Artists

Martín Mele

Press release

It must have been a pretty huge trouser pocket. Juan, a physicist and a friend of Martín Mele’s father, wore his trousers high and his pockets deep. In Mele’s childhood memories, one thing after another would surface from these pockets, as if Juan weren’t digging into his pockets, but into another dimension. For a child, this isn’t a magic trick, but a fact: the pocket is big enough to contain the world. Childhood memories are bizarrely precise and at the same time entirely unreliable. We remember things that we really can’t have remembered, because the first years of our lives lie almost entirely in the dark. But particular images remain all the more focused: a certain color, a pair of trousers, a movement, a smell. What remains has long since mixed with stories, later images, and our own imagination. Memory is not chronology. It is a peculiar form of assembly. Mele’s artistic practice moves in such shifts; found objects, and experiences, material and image, personal history and cultural memory come into contact with one another. Things are taken out of context, reassembled, and thereby change their meaning. Painting can become sculpture, an object become memory, an act become part of the work. Nothing has to remain where we initially suspect it. In this way, mountains become breasts and breasts once again become mountains. Cats surface, figures, faces and letter portraits come about as well. The letters of a name—J, U, A, N—turn into a portrait of the person named. Language becomes image, the name is given a face. Some shapes even leave the two-dimensional order of the image and become soft, bodily expansions in space. Here, it is not about creating a clear correspondence between the mountain and the breast. What is more interesting is the moment in which the one reading destabilizes the other and the eye is forced to abandon its own sense of certainty. This back and forth in particular reveals something of the play that runs through Mele’s works. Orders are shifted, things can change places, times collapse into one another, and memories mix with unfamiliar images. Landscape and nude, body and nature, image and object can surpass their limits, without their (hi)story disappearing. On the contrary: art historical references remain present, while they find themselves in new contexts through transference, irony, and transformation. The familiar is not dissolved, but turned so long until it is visible from another side. The exhibition space also follows this movement. Images, objects, and materials condense to form a situation that is not only viewed, but experienced. With the artist’s performance, this situation changes once again: the space becomes a site of encounter between what is already there and what is taking place at the moment. Memory becomes present, the image is given a plot, and the fixed state of the exhibition becomes, for a moment, something mobile. This is what makes this play particularly interesting: it not only shifts things, but reveals their relationships. In a present where so much is trimmed for high performance, use and profitability, lies a strange force of resistance. Something can refuse a clear function, a form can change its meaning, an image can contain more than a single possibility. Juan’s pocket here remains the best image for this. Things do not simply disappear in them, they reemerge, changed: a cat, a mountain, a breast, a name, a bit of childhood. You reach inside, never knowing what will come out. Marlene Marti Bürgi Trans. Brian Currid