When the city gets “Melle” with art

Miss (Deux-Sèvres). Melle is not Venice. But the commune in the Deux-Sèvres department (around 2,500 souls and some 6,000 with the community of communes) also has its International Contemporary Art Biennial, created in 2003, as an extension of the “Romanes” Contemporary Art Festival, launched in 1996.

This year for its 10th edition, the event has chosen the artist Evariste Richer (born in 1969) as curator who, under the title “Nous merveillons”, has taken as his theme, in summary, ecological issues, the way in which man and art react to changes in the biosphere and, in his own words, the wish to “to awaken consciences and restore a taste for wonder”. A whole program which offers more than 150 works by 50 artists.

Evariste Richer knows Melle since he inaugurated last June the public commission that the City placed with him, the third in its triad of magnificent Romanesque churches after those of Mathieu Lehanneur in the Saint-Hilaire church in 2011 and Rémy Hysbergue in the Saint-Savinien church in 2012. Richer chose to intervene in the bell tower of the Saint-Pierre church and replace the louvers (intended to lower the sound of the now silent bells towards the ground) with glass blades to install his Metaprism, an interpretation and an artistic variation of the photometeor, in other words the rainbow and its spectrum of colors that unfolds subtly both inside and outside.

It is in this same church that Linda Sanchez and Baptiste Croze have arranged [voir ill.]on the floor of the nave, some 400 balls, balls and balloons, mostly made of plastic, like so much waste thrown up by the sea that the two Marseille artists have recovered on the coasts of the Mediterranean. As a counterpoint, they bring down from the ceiling, suspended from wires, the fingers cast in lead of a hundred inhabitants who come to point out details of the architecture. On the mezzanine of the organ, a sculpture by Juan Muñoz evokes a human being on a column observing the constellation of balls mentioned above. Finally, at the crossing of the transept, a mirror sculpture by Michelangelo Pistoletto reflects both the architecture, the other works and the spectator who looks at them in a magnificent coherence between each work and the precise place where they are installed.

50 kilos of roses

This aspect is perpetuated in the Saint-Savinien church where Herman de Vries has arranged on the ground, in a circle of almost 3 meters in diameter, 50 kilos of dried roses. This red circle obviously dialogues with the installation of crushed tiles by Marco Godinho, with the suspension made by Laurent Montaron composed of a train of transparent kites and with the three beautiful spray paintings on cloth, like shrouds, by Michel Dector. The atmosphere is completely different in the labyrinthine route of the Hôtel de Ménoc, the former courthouse, where nearly 70 works are brought together (by 22 artists including Bruno Serralongue, Didier Marcel, Éric Baudart, etc.) from the collections of several Frac, Poitou-Charentes, Angoulême, Nouvelle-Aquitaine Méca, Bordeaux, Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Limoges as well as the Château de Rochechouart or Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, etc.

Even if bridges are created between some of them as well as subtle adequacies between these works and the place where they are installed, the whole has less impact than the installations specially created for this Biennale like those that can be found all over the city, and in particular near the Chemin de la Découverte, an arboretum created in 2007 by Gilles Clément, labeled “Remarkable Garden”. For example, this superb intervention by Jan Kopp, who suspended from the ceiling of the Jeanne d’Arc room more than 1,500 thistle stems, upside down. Or in the Clos Marie orchard, this hopscotch by Dominique Ghesquière [voir ill.]whose last slab is erected vertically like a tombstone. Or these five bird boxes by Olivier Leroy, trompe-l’oeil since their entrance is blocked. And it is undeniably from these works that the Biennale draws all its strength and poetry.