Adrien Menu French, 1991
“I like to think that the images, objects and spaces I create enter into a tension with the reality I observe and experience, sometimes concealed beneath the appearance of trompe-l’œil.”
Adrien Menu lives and works in Marseille, France. His practice explores the relationships between space, memory and everyday life through sculptures and installations that meticulously reproduce familiar elements, transforming them into something more uncertain and uncanny. His work focuses in particular on what usually escapes our attention: ordinary objects, urban infrastructure, everyday gestures, traces of use and fragments of architecture.
Through close observation of the world around him, Menu recreates textures, shapes and materials, displacing them from their original contexts. Subway handrails, bottles, holes dug into the earth, electrical cables and insects become sculptural objects that create a tension between the familiar and the uncanny, reality and its representation. Trompe-l’œil plays an important role in this approach, not simply as an illusion, but as a way of questioning how we look at things and distinguish between what is real and what has been reproduced.
Personal memory also runs throughout his work. Domestic spaces associated with childhood, family gestures and fragments of places that no longer exist are brought into exhibition spaces. Architecture becomes a space for memory, where intimate recollections overlap with the material elements of everyday life. By drawing attention to traces, remnants and what is usually concealed, Menu reveals the fragility of the spaces that surround us.
His work invites us to slow down and pay attention to what usually remains at the edges of our vision. Balancing precision with a sense of the uncanny, Adrien Menu transforms ordinary details into sculptural presences, creating spaces where everyday life, memory and fiction converge.