Dick&VLE
Live and work in Liège
Dick & VLE is a duo, born of a collective; the evidence of a meeting between two worlds and two paths, a desire to confront their techniques, their graphic obsessions, their sense of frame and space. Melissa Pena Espartero (Dick) has an academic background, mastering a number of artistic practices, while Simon Medard (VLE) is self-taught and versatile; they meet in creativity and exacting standards, they talk to each other, on large format, taking over space, creating a work in which they surprise each other.
There’s the long preliminary research, there’s their desire to explore different media together, in order to create the essential composition that frees conflicts, titillates limits, unleashes their imaginations. There’s an incessant, abundant dialogue between the two of them, in which their strokes and their acute taste for geometry respond to each other. (…)
What strikes you first are the bright, cheerful colors, then the assured, deeply organic shapes and axes, and finally the accumulations and installations that are both showcases and works themselves: a reflexive scenography that occupies the terrain and modifies the environment. Sometimes there are words, phrases, always sensitive and without artifice. Objects are accumulated and transformed, colored and reinvented to occupy a space, cultivate it and make it happen, making it a place of pleasure, ironic catharsis and communicative ode to joy. Joy of living, of dialogue, of reappropriating the ephemeral and transforming our living spaces, a way of exploring the idea of a space that never gives up on telling a story. Nothing in their work is vain, nothing is pompous or fierce, everything is playful, immediate, sensory and impertinent. Rare, then.
Caroline Gonce – 2020