Opening: May 7, 2009, at 8pm, with the artist.
Michel Soskine is pleased to present 43 drawings by French artist Fabien Mérelle, the first exhibition in Spain after being awarded a Casa Velázquez residence grant in 2007.
Fabien Mérelle’s drawings impress with their sharpness of line and imagination. A sharpness that also lies in the humor behind his characters, often self-portraits in pajama pants: A world where absurdity, dreams and memories come together.
At 28, Fabien Mérelle exudes the maturity of someone who has already metabolized life, or rather the Childhood period of life: a time period from which Mérelle derives his work, vindicated as a strong and deep time frame, far from that sweetened glaze through which childhood is usually contemplated.
Fabien Mérelle’s drawings display a personal mythology of animals, friends and self-portraits in a Pandora's Box that seems to emerge from under the bed when going to sleep, from his particular play room, where dreams and imagination find their way out and onto the cream colored sheet of paper. All drawings remain intimate in scale, as the artist draws on the same size sheet, sometimes extending it to a diptych .
In those realist drawings there is no place for indecision. Lines are precise and sharp. A vivid admirer of master draughtsman, such as Rembrandt, Durer and Goya, Mérelle’s drawings exude also a dark humor, a sense of the absurd in a visual world where humans and animals often mingle, and where the artist childhood fears and dreams are revisited on paper.
Mérelle graduated from the Paris École des Beaux Arts and more recently spent several months studying, under an exchange program, with a Chinese master near Shanghai.