ARTIST STATEMENT:
Melvin Pattyn is a Belgian artist who uses fire as an artistic medium. With his own approach to soot painting, he uses flames as a brush and creates images that are formed not by paint, but through combustion. Soot forms the pigment; heat provides the expressive power. Each work emerges from the constant interplay between control and surrender to the medium. The flame leaves traces that can never be fully controlled, but can be carefully guided. It is precisely in that delicate balance between intention and unpredictability that his artistic practice finds its essence.
The work evolves through a process of building up and removing. Dark layers are applied and then removed again, as if the image were not being created but revealed. What emerges reveals itself only partially and, at the same time, seems to withdraw from view once more. Every intervention leaves a trace of what has been, but also of what has disappeared. In this context, black is not an endpoint, but an infinite realm of possibilities. Depending on the light, distance and viewpoint, the work constantly shifts in appearance. The surface remains in motion, like a silent echo of the fire from which it was born.
The fragility of the image forms a central theme in his work: not as something breakable, but as something that is constantly in a state of becoming. Figures, appear as fleeting manifestations within a field of soot and shadow. They seem to emerge from a collective memory, only to dissolve once more into the darkness from which they arose. For him, soot painting is an exploration of transformation: how destruction and creation intersect, how absence can take shape, how light becomes visible through darkness. What emerges is not merely an image, but the trace of an encounter between fire, time and matter.
MAIL : [email protected]
STUDIO : At Kortrijk, Belgium
Artworks are for sale.
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