The work exhibited here constitutes a preparatory study of the sculpture on Burgundy stone produced for the CIAP spaces within the new Cité de la Gastronomie et du Vin in Dijon and unveiled during its inauguration in May 2022.

What Fabien Merelle says about the sculpture:

“The image was imprinted on me after my first visit to the future CIAP site, after having interviewed those who kindly introduced me to the place. It hasn't left me since then. A child from behind. A child of today, almost immersed in this mineral elsewhere. Our childhood, looking through the strata and the long time, the childhood of the world. One of the two stelae is smooth, like a leaf. It is the material transformed by us, shaped to build. It is here the receptacle of a drawing, as the stone has always been. This matter, we forget that it is matter. It bears our imprint, cut straight by a machine, like a lump of butter. The other is raw, as it is in the quarry, except for the earth which covered it. I want it to be discovered like this, this rock of Massangis, this rock of Burgundy. The very one that constitutes the ground and walls of Dijon. I want people to see it in its pure beauty, a piece of wall, a fragment of landscape. This relief that all the science of a sculptor cannot reproduce, the Earth shapes it by force of water, wind, sediment. The place that receives these two stelae was created to collect children abandoned eight centuries ago.

I will have it in mind while drawing, as if this rectangle of 180 by 70 was a door, or a window open on our ancestors, on our contemporaries, to speak simply of childhood. To speak of these beginnings that are our first years, of this richness, this fragility, this power when we invoke it once it is over, this need to protect it as much as possible. This child is mine, it is what I value the most and what I will paint with the most humanity without any doubt. This child, I hope, is also yours or the one you were in what is universal.
Crédit Photo : Fabien Merelle