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Meyoko

The game of patience and obsession -
Interview Melissa Murillo

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Meyoko creates the metamorphosis of a surreal world inhabited with hybrids characters and peculiar fauna, close to micrography, she uses black rotring to calligraphy a luxuriant nature and forest populated with tattooed plants. She illustrates a poetic ideal's dream geared toward the
imaginary and a world of wonder.
Melissa Murillo, from Equatorial origins, met in Paris with the passion of Art, disappointment and turbulence from teenage, and went to live in Berlin, in an environment more suitable for Meyoko's development and in search of her path, resolutely devoted to her art.

Sabine Morandini: Do you believe in love?

Meyoko aka Melissa Murillo
: I can't even answer myself to this question. I imagine that the disapointements that
I went through with my parents made me doubt of everything, especially concerning other people's feelings toward me.
Love is a very important source of inspiration for me and in my work.
I need constant innovation, which means that I don't draw my inspiration from the person with whom I am with , but rather from the various platonic and sporadic relationship to which I will never need to give any human closeness even though I might want to.
No, for now I don't believe in love, but I draw and dream with it.

Sabine Morandini: Is black and white your way to go to the essence of things?

Meyoko
: Really I'm not trying to go to the essence of things, what matters to me is the signification. And more importantly the metaphor. For example in the Tibetan opera, a black and white persona is used to represent a character having a double personality or a double role, and in my art it is essential what I'm trying to convey. 

SM: If you had to chose rotring colors?
M
: I think it would be red as for Indian Buddhists it represents the total lack of interest for outside appearance and absolute detachment from physical things, which reflects my personality very well.

SM: How do you manage to connect your multiple inspirations ( tatoos, calligraphy..)
M: My work is generally a combination of things that I absorb in my dailies, things that suddenly become an idea, it can be a picture that I run into, a movie, a song, book extracts, magazines or documentaries, that may not be related, but have a certain influence in my work. I'm never really sure but I think it's the whole of interior contemplation and observation in general that interest me, like flying birds.

SM: How long does it take to achieve a drawing, and does it become tiring with time? 
M: Several days. I think that my drawings are prepared like a mathematical or scientific formula. It's very precise. It may seem a little crazy and it is! It really is but it's a calculated dementia. The first reflex is generally good, but sometimes working on an illustration is more complex. I pay attention to details, I try my best to make it epic.

SM: Long preparation or improvisation? 
M: As I said I think it's a combination of things that I absorb daily. When I start an illustration I start with a simple image and then I build around it. That's when I start to wonder what will happen next, what form or what line, of course I try to make things complicated in a controlled way. Most of the time I really don't know what I'm going to draw, I don't know where I'm going. It's like solving an enigma. I like to not know what the final result will be.

SM: Haute Couture details?
M: I think that frivolity is a characteristic that I can borrow from this environment. But I think that my drawings are more human, something that any man of any class or race can feel. I won't say Haute Couture as Haute Couture often finds its inspiration in ancient cultures, and just like it. I find my inspiration in ancient sources like Islam.

SM: An obsessive work where you can't move your hands anymore, therapy? Emergency?
M: Yes, sometimes when I start a drawing I feel free and far from everything on earth, but days later, I really want to finish for the fear and stress of the final rendition.

SM: What artists do you like or inspired you?
M: Without a doubt Rene Magritte and Salvador Dali!! After them there is a long list but long before them, I don't think there are better artists except for nature itself.

SM: What is your dream, do you have an ideal?
M: What am I dreaming of? A better and more equitable world.

SM: Are you a seeker of beauty?
M: Yes I think that beauty is a necessity in a world filled with horrible events, but I won't say that I seek a superficial beauty. I seek purity in beauty, filled with human signification.

SM: Does nature inspire you? Does your work reflect it?
M: Of course nature is the basis in everything I do and I take it into account for every detail.

SM: France, asylum land or obstacle?
M: I would say both, France has been an eye opener for me, it welcomed me and I built my identity with everything that I discovered there. But as often in a relation ship happiness couldn't last forever and I had to leave it with tears in my eyes.

SM: Tell us about your equatorial origins. Do you have good memories of it?  
M: I will say wonderful memories, my country is the source for my inspiration , everything I lived over there is my basis for each creation of a drawing. I remember that I loved to go to the mountains in the Andes to admire the volcanoes around me and all those ecosystems that make my country a paradise on earth.

SM: What fascinates you?
M: Kindness and the ethnics that are fighting to survive in this world dominated with individal interests.



Interview by Sabine Morandini
MANY THANKS TO

Melissa and sequence opera: Lea Becker
Hylas Film

PHOTOS

Copyright Meyoko



VIDEO

Meyoko by Meyoko
video by Hylas Film
Interview Sabine Morandini


<p>Sequence opera : Lea Becker&nbsp; <br /><a href="http://www.leabecker.com/" target="_self">http://www.leabecker.com/</a></p>

www.meyoko.com
www.myspace.com/meyoko
meyokoillustrations.blogspot.com/