Born in 1981 in Fontenay-sous-Bois, Fabien Merelle lives and works in Paris. A young graduate from the École des Beaux-Arts of Paris, a former resident of the prestigious Casa Vélasquez in Madrid, Fabien Merelle has an impressively realistic and meticulous style, and a sensibility that displays his Pandora’s box with art and humor. Just 26 years old, he demonstrates an amazing maturity in his candid, grotesque, absurd and irreverent drawings, which emerge straight from childhood. This young artist has a quasi-maniacal obsession for detail, but most impressive is the precision of his line, heightened by the use of black India ink. In 2002, Merelle traveled to China. Thanks to a foreign exchange grant, he was able to spend four months at the fine arts school, meeting a Chinese master who invited him to discover a more intimate and subtle vision of reality. While spending several summers working in children’s day camps, listening and observing attentively, he amassed a store of memories. From these exchanges, he learned how to return to his children’s drawings, which he had carefully saved in the drawers of an old family chest. He took these sketches and added new figures, appropriating the roughly drawn lines of his childhood drawings with a sense of humor. In his recent works, we see him being devoured by giant sheep or threatened by strange, anthropomorphic carpets with fingers. Merelle records his ghosts, his monsters and his childhood fears on paper. Invariably clad in pajama pants, a clear message that a perception of the world comes through dreams, the boy with an adult face takes us along a whimsical exploration through his imagination.