Despite the fictitious character of the theatrical stagings painted by Melen, and notwithstanding his dreamlike winks, “Born to love, forced to fight”, his first solo exhibition, has an autobiographical component. Based on the artist’s experience, this pictorial exercise in self-fiction portrays everyday life in the city (Lima, Buenos Aires, Latin America), proposing a reflection that aspires to have a generational scope.

The visual references that Melen articulates range from Mexican muralism (in the construction of his characters, although more oriented towards histrionics than heroism), mannerism (the affected gestures of his characters), comics (in his attention to certain graphic details worked as drawings), Queer Figuration (in the expressive intimacy of his interiors) and, transversally, cinema (his compositions echo cinematic framing). But these works, rather than portraying the maelstrom of the present-barely glimpsed in city scenes-or the anxieties of the future-previously evaded by the hand of different substances and in virtual realities-, evoke what the present has of paralysis, since the future that is envisioned is a “dopplegänger” of the present itself.