Ni Adam, Ni Ève

The ephemeral unsettles, stirs up and drags toward an evolution. In Jan's painting it is a receding evolution, a search for the silence before the origin, for an acceptance of the body before it is a body, before emotions, eyelashes, fragments of mythologies, gestures, painted or gnawed nails.

When volumes swell into deformities and contradictions suddenly make sense, the canvas becomes a confrontation with an internal process: mass, brain and soul wandering in the invisible. Do you seek to disappear, or do you prefer to emerge from a void that breathes?

Following residencies in Mexico, São Paulo, Bergamo and Rocco Sinibalda, Jan Melka is showing in Paris at Vie Projects, in collaboration with Romero Paprocki, beings that intertwine with intimate labyrinths. Other beings float, the depth of space in the white or from the skin, but a timeless depth where a body has the right to simply exist, to escape, to disassociate, to step out of the canvas and become a chair that doesn't need another body on top of it to feel alive.

Jan Melka, French American visual artist, lives and works in Paris. Her practice explores the transformation of bodies and their limits in space, blending painterly approaches with design-driven research. She represent the figure as an unstable territory, at once intimate and exposed. Her work explores the shifting threshold between surface and interiority, between what is made visible and what resists articulation.

She develops fragmented forms structured by tension and refusal of resolution. These figures em- body contradiction, displacement, and imbalance. Gesture is central to her approach, conveying sensation directly through form rather than through overt metaphor.

In a visual landscape increasingly shaped by premeditation and control, Melka preserves a space of openness, a margin for contingency. Accidents, missteps, and material resistance are inte- grated into the work, allowing a presence to emerge that cannot be fully anticipated or syste- matized. Painting, for her, is not limited to image making but constitutes a position: each work inscribes a trace that eludes the logics of simulation and optimization, affirming instead an irreducible existence.

Within a cultural environment driven by efficiency, prediction, and calculation, Jan Melka pro- duces open, unstable works that pursue no fixed resolution, but aim to intensify sensory expe- rience.