To translate something inner – meaning, something invisible and shapeless – into a language of materials shades motifs objects, this could be the artwork’s primary ability. Take a look at this scenic dusk, these burgundy squares, this particular mouth or hairdo, this bended piece of wood, this horse, these glossy black splashes and know that they’re translations of someone’s insides. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re images of someone’s insides. Orange or hoofs are not necessarily biographical.

Basic blocks of whites and creatures, low-key panels of colors and letters, that is pretty much what is in here. Just that. Melanie Kitti and Mickael Marman’s blocks and panels. Spray paint, acrylic, glue, canvas, newspaper, plaster, shades of auburn, such things are compiled in square units alternately looking unsentimentally gorgeous and almost factual and subtly ripe with wordless grieving. On the surface as well as at the core of every abstract painting, a what or a why usually beams, and the brighter they beam the easier it becomes to forget that a language you don’t really understand is still a language. And that what you say is not who you are.

Some voices belong to multiple languages.
or
Some humans are stretched out across half a globe.
or
Some hearts are a bit more broken from the outset.
or
Some minds span several oceans.

Does that make them more eager or less eager to speak.

Melanie Kitti and Mickael Marman express themselves in different languages and almost identical languages, they are unified and they are apart. When two bodies of work meet in a space, a conversation between them doesn’t necessarily occur but these layered surfaces and irregular cubes seem to communicate. It might be in a low-voiced or an ambiguous manner, but strings of cohesion are braided among the two quite different and quite consistent conversation partners. Marman’s paintings might be two dimensional but they’re not flat. Kitti’s sculptures might be cast but they’re also excavations. Carving out or piling up, two different strategies for arriving at the outlined objects. The sentences.

What then, do they say, these sentences. A question for the dictionary just before remembering that images, perhaps the motif-less ones in particular, are the opposite of words. Does that mean that they’re in closer
proximity to a human being’s essence. Does that mean that they’re truer. Yellow and silver and sudden pastels applied with something that looks like intuition and strict determination and very open eyes. Color is always emotion, especially when you’re better at looking than speaking. Other people’s words, those may come easier. Other beings’ bodies: horse or goat if a feeling of self is absent or shattered.

Pieces of Melanie Kitti and pieces of Mickael Marman are assembled in here. Sorrow.
Assembling pieces in order to understand a bigger and a dimmer picture.
Assembling pieces in order to repair something broken.
Assembling pieces in order to mend what has been torn apart.

— Nanna Friis