Polysemic and multi-coloured, Aurélie Menaldo’s universe evokes childhood, and the sacred but also the absurd in the surrealist style.  Her artistic projects begin with the collection of all kinds of objects which she chooses according to their appearance, materials and colours.  From this basic vocabulary, she composes and assembles sculptures and installations the design of which are usually influenced by their place of exposure.  She also collects extracts of texts which will accompany her creations and inspire their titles.  Her works raise parallel feelings of familiarity and strangeness because of the unexpected combinations of well-known objects. 

Aurélie Menaldo prefers using elementary gestures to execute her simple sculptures.  The everyday objects mean they are immediately relatable, transformed by a childlike logic capable of creating a fantastical world.  She distorts their primary function by giving them a fragility and a precarious balance, while allowing them an aesthetic touching on the decorative which she does not shy away from confronting head on, an aspect of art that, apparently, cannot be denied.   

Since the beginning of her career, Aurélie Menaldo has created works which play on ambiguity, between the serious and the flippant, danger and safety, utilitarian and unusable.  By assembling incongruous, vividly coloured objects, she slightly shifts the point of view and opens the way to fictional stories.  The objects confront us with our absurdities: in the playground at the Villa du Parc—its slide balancing on one foot, its unusual swings—are disconcerting; the footbridge in the colours of a Playmobile circuit invading the Octave Cowbell gallery in Metz forcing a specific, raised trajectory from window to window; the supermarket turnstiles, painted red, which make a waste ground bloom; the miniature city of the future composed of dwellings for rodents made of plastic.  Inside or in public space, the procedure is identical and conducts us straight into a dystopia where chattering birds make a cage explode, where giant tops take up all the available space, and where footballs in cement suggest a new game.