Endless Poems 7

Livres et acier / Books and steel

2024

Inès Mélia borrows from the poetry of Constantin Brancusi’s works. Her book totems are reminiscent of Brancusi’s Endless Column, evoking or rather invoking, the book as a spiritual, almost mystical presence. These vertical forms become pagan prayers for material and spiritual liberation. Paying tribute to the functional yet formally powerful designs of Ettore Sottsass, Mélia’s painted and sculpted compositions echo the Italian artist’s ethos. Sottsass once said that his creations referred “to the great cosmic revolutions of which human life is a fragment,” and that his use of color aimed to “release positive, vital, and even therapeutic energies.” Between scholarship and spontaneity, Mélia frees both the object and its content, isolating them from their bourgeois or elitist context. The book, often reduced to a decorative item and condemned to seclusion on a shelf, is here reimagined as a display to walk through and experience. Inès Mélia considers the book-object and its content as an indivisible whole. Once browsed and arranged in a certain way, the book becomes a vector and metaphor for mental organization, a structure that informs a way of thinking.