Fluid Sculpture
The Liquid Effect
Fluid sculpture is a concept built by Mel Lesbats. This artist loves liquid. Fluid is the beginning of life! The body contains fluid that can be touched after hurting. Liquids are before shapes. She questioned the materiality of the fluid, and somehow, its artistic semantics.
Why so liquid ?
She is a visual artist specializing in the realisation of colorful liquid sculptures. She is interested in perception and, for that, deconstructs the role of the visual artist.
Artists produce objects. An object has the property of being used to be touchable, generally solid. She wondered if it was possible to produce a fluid object, impossible to catch, an object flowing between hands.
Starting point
The artist grew up in a restaurant, so she naturally developed a vocabulary of shapes and materials related to food, a panel of processes borrowed from the world of restoration. Since ever, She has seen her father making emulsions, baking, cooking, and loving material. She used to say eggs and flour are cook’s glue. She remembers sculptures he made with sugar and chocolate or with potatoes or tomatoes… All were colorful and sensitive, attractive…
Why food ?
Her work do not directly (or conceptually) question the food, our way of consuming, but propose to use their methods and their means to renew the artistic questions about painting and sculpture. She does not want to make a value judgment about consumer society, just finding a way of making art. Today’s art lacks substance for being afraid of loosing concept, she just wants to add material in there, to make it sensitive, sensual, as it was first.
About liquids and Sculpture
Can a sculpture be liquid?
A sculpture is usually not liquid, but I try to starve fluid. Liquids flow between hands, it can only be held in by a container. Would it be the receptacle that allows the sculpture, or would it be the mixed liquids inside ? But nevertheless, we can see shapes appearing inside glass. They seem to be sculpted and carve again with time. Fluids are compressed, emulsified, decanted like a wood chisel. Their viscosity and density are used to carve colored effects.
Living sculpture ?
Time effect directly impacts the sculpture. They are living sculptures. Fluids are moving inside the container, color is changing due to weather or ambient light or viewer’s eyes, tense… It’s a melancholic work, we can never stop the moment, just enjoy it for now, and hope to feel it again. Fluid sculptures are like a few moments in life, just to feel, can never be replaced. We had to be present in our perception to understand it. Time’s running, we can run or feel.
Colorful Liquids
Color is an important part of her work, it is also in the methods and means used by the consumer industry to attract the eye, to bait the customer, to interpellate. Color has something attractive, visual, and seeing. Supermarkets are colorful places. Eyes are attracted by all ways. Some contemporary photographers have shown they can be real paintings. All packaging is made to be attractive, sensitive, colorful. Even products are selected to be calibrated, standardized, to be as beautiful as the others.
Colorful material
Color is related to its substance, it materializes differently according to the physical qualities of the object and questions fundamentally the painting. Tomatoes are not as red as strawberries, like candles, as silk or leather. Oil and water and other liquids don’t have the same density or viscosity. They can’t reflect light the same way. The quantity of pigments modifies their reflection, their intensity, their transparency. I can play with a huge value of tint.
What about painting ?
Mel Lesbats always love paintings but she always wondered how to make new paintings. How to renew the practice of painting in the era when we consider that the avant-gardes have exhausted it?
Paintings used to be petrified fluids. But inside the containers of which her sculptures are composed, we can see real paintings.
Painting process
Colored materials are worked from impasto to glaze as they would be in a contemporary abstract painting. But these paintings are fluid. When we shift the sculpture, tinted fluids run inside the glass. Color is liquid. It moves inside the sight of the viewer. It needs a sight to be perceived. Color intensity depends on the viewer and his perception of light and material. Color is worked to make effect like glow, iridescence, or luminosity.
Perception process (ou living process)
They are juicy watery paintings ! The color is worked with transparency and texture. Tinges are diversified, they depend on density about solutions and colorants, ambient light, spectator’s eyes and time. The Effects are almost infinite, hues change days by days, imperceptibly. Pigments separate slowly from liquids, generating moving shapes, appearing like concretions. These serous liquids remind love philter or magic potions. Mysterious, these fluids are untouchable, shut in a container close forever.
Light painting
Light is a very important part of her work. Passing through the colorful fluids, the light projects a tinted glow on the wall. The perception of her sculptures depends on brightness. How to enlighten liquids ? With good lighting, they can project their colored shadow. Working with the shadow is like materializing a ghost, impossible to catch, a stealthy presence.
Art process
If this work are paintings, these paintings appear like rainbows in nature, in the eye (and motor skills) of the viewer. We can see the influence of artists like Ann Veronica Janssens or Olafur Eliasson. These paintings of colored light are evanescent, unstable, fleeting, precarious, immaterial.
Ghost painting
Projected and colored shadows are part of the work. These fleeting reflections ask a new painting, a painting that would exist only in the presence of a glance. Each work is a work of perception. Each work mentions the tenuousness of existence. The light is like a ghost appearing a few moments, we just have to feel the instant.
What is Melart ?
She named her studio the Melart. An ancient pub, what else to make liquid art? A place where lots of liquids were stocked, drunk, consumed. The place is directly related to liquids. It’s a huge and comfortable studio where she can experiment with her art.
A popular art ?
Since the lockdown, Mel Lesbats realizes that people lack art. In France, culture was even mutilated that they could not buy books during the closing of nonessential businesses. It was so mad for her that it oriented her artistic work in a most popular way. She found a way to offer free art for people. She realizes recipes and short videos to explain how to make liquid sculptures at home.