Addicted to realism, obsessed with endless detail, meticulous to the extreme, I had lost the knack of enjoying drawing. The drawing you did just to pass the time, to satisfy an impulse. The drawings, which expressed in just a few lines of a felt pen all that was so hard to say at the age of six with words. I tried to return to the line, unbroken by time and to the happy nature of the child I was, without ruining it. I wanted sharps and flats, thin and thick, voices, writing that intermingled. I was seeking eloquent empty spaces in these colorful relics, and found in them silences filled with questions. I did not want a confrontation, a before/after. Adopting a fake childlike style would have been equally sterile. I was dreaming of a give and take, an illustrated conversation. Checking out childhood was like opening a Pandora’s box of primary fears; it meant taking my mind back to a mythology forged in the darkness of a bedroom, at bed time. A mythology I tried to bury under hair and the mask of puberty and all the rest. But, rather than disappearing, it came to dwell in my drawings, ever since a theater of unbridled conflict and desires; now, a reality tamed. - Fabien Merelle