01. Article about MyLittleRedCar in AUTOHEROES magazine #015

POETRY IN BODYWORK

From your days of bruised knees, pebbles in your pockets, and a black eye, what remains most of all is the little car with which you raised hell. The one that eluded every police chase in the morning and settled scores with gangsters in the afternoon. Thanks to Julien's magic, the one that spent years at the bottom of a box can now proudly bear witness to your exploits in your living room.

Text by Ethan Valentin / Photos by Julien Lutt and Julien Melica

"Each painting is a realized utopia, the lost paradise of childhood."

How to relive your childhood incognito? By ordering your Little Red Car from Julien Melica. Where are Little Red Cars born? They often wait for years in the depths of your childhood attic, or in the jumble of a wooden crate at a flea market. Sometimes, they begin as nothing more than an idea, an unfulfilled dream. Whatever the origin of your Little Red Car, your childhood dream will proudly and discreetly display a part of yourself that connoisseurs will appreciate. Under the glass roof of his photography studio, which resembles a garage, Julien's paintings are a gateway to the world of childhood dreams. But it is undoubtedly his partner, Lydie Luttenbacher, who speaks best about her artist husband: "It's fleeting. A delightful confusion of the senses. It's Aunt Léonie's madeleine for Proust or the city of Moscow for Chekhov's Three Sisters." It's the laughter of a young Jean-Pierre Léaud for Truffaut, or a winning Mistral for Renaud. Each of Julien's paintings is a realized utopia, the lost paradise of childhood." These words speak volumes about their close bond. So much so that it's difficult to talk about Julien without mentioning their poetic partnership. For over 25 years, Julien Mélica has wielded his cameras with the same care he cherishes with his gaze upon his childhood dream come true: a beautiful, vibrant red Jaguar E-Type.

An epicurean and collector of life's precious moments, he shares with his partner an infinite love for people and photography. On their wedding photography website, you can read: “These aren't photos. They're her gaze upon you, her first kisses. They're your passionate conversations, the turmoil in her eyes, and the shiver on her skin. These aren't photos. They're the words you'll want to say to her in a year, in twenty years, forever.” Lydie and Julien capture these tiny moments of eternity on paper. And it is with this poetic and exacting spirit that Julien approached photographing miniature models. Alongside his portrait work, he firmly believes that certain objects are capable of emotion. Like a person, they can reflect sensations, feelings, fragments of existence. He began by photographing “still life”… which quickly transformed into photography of “living objects,” as Julien strives to breathe new life into the objects he photographs and revive long-forgotten sensations. The turning point came the day he saw one of his children examining a small metal car from every angle. His own childhood came flooding back, hours spent dreaming, a miniature in hand, in that almost supernatural state of concentration. A timeless moment where all the senses are focused, even devoted, to their favorite toy. Since then, Julien’s phenomenal work has been inversely proportional to the size of his subjects. Julien casts the wonderstruck gaze of a little boy upon this miniature world. Attention to detail, the magic of light, the poetry of curves, and the charm of imperfections—he transforms each car into a true work of art. In his photo studio, he developed a very particular shooting technique: “In portraiture, we try to erase imperfections. Here, on the contrary, I strive to bring out every imperfection, every speck of dust, every scratch, or conversely, the perfect condition. I think that toy cars reflect the personality of the child who held them: meticulous, boisterous, conscientious, impatient, mischievous, or adventurous. They all have a story linked to the person who asks me to photograph them.” Behind each picture, therefore, lies a story. Julien’s begins with dreams of a twelve-cylinder symphony, an endless hood, and a jaguar as his emblem. The E-Type of his childhood daydreams has become a reality, as you can see in the photos where the English majesty adorns his artist’s studio with its perfect form:

"These little cars reflect the personality of the child who held them."

Most of my clients own the full-size miniature they ask me to translate into a painting. Or they own a car of the same make, even if it's not exactly the same model they played with as children. Others have lost their original miniature and found a similar model at a dealership. But, in all cases, there's a link between their childhood and their adult reality. Between nostalgia and poetry, discovering a painting is always an emotional moment: "When I exhibit my images, I sometimes notice a strong emotion in the moist eyes of someone who recognizes the model that was so dear to them as a child. It's precisely this moment that gives meaning to my artistic approach: when everything seems to come flooding back, when the voice catches in the throat, this experience of the childlike eruption of the viewer's own memory." And... in all modesty, it might even go further... I sometimes feel like I'm touching on the universal because everyone tries to recognize themselves in one or another car, more or less altered by use, depending on the kind of child they themselves were! » Once the car has been photographed with an elaborate system of studio flashes and other reflectors, Julien refines his photos down to the smallest detail using the retouching, calibration, and printing techniques he has mastered for a long time: “It was my wife's grandfather who taught me photo retouching, a profession he practiced from the 1940s onward, well before the invention of Photoshop. In my early days, I worked with film, so I learned from him how to retouch negatives and then prints. It was precise retouching, applied sparingly, which gave a very natural result.” This is how I still conceive of my images today; retouching is used to transcribe reality as accurately as possible, without sophistication, without the supernatural. It's about not dulling the soul of the object. It would take a very clever person to understand the hours of post-production work spent in front of a computer screen before making a print: "That's precisely the secret; the technique must be invisible to allow the true emotion to emerge, without artifice." Printed on Altuglass, the result is striking, to the point of giving the feeling of rediscovering your model car. A bit like when you invest in a high-end hi-fi system and find yourself rediscovering your favorite tracks, hearing nuances never perceived before: "Even if you feel like you know your car inside and out, the print gives a completely different feeling, as if it intensifies reality by transforming our perception of the object." A rather inexplicable sensation, which should almost be reversed, since we're going from a three-dimensional object to a two-dimensional one. Julien's magic formula lies in two essential ingredients: the demand for perfectly executed technical work and a client who was once a child. Julien helps us understand that objects, too, have a soul: "I've photographed all sorts of objects linked to a life story. Sometimes I'm sent cuddly toys so worn and patched up that I hardly dare touch them; I feel like they're going to start breathing, so marked are they by the life of the person who owned them!" In a corner of his studio, Julien has placed a monumental hood from a wrecked E-Type:
“It’s my car. A postal van ran a red light on me. It took me a year to repair my car. It should be a bad memory… and yet I can’t part with it. It was also at that moment that I realized I loved photographing imperfections and scratches on model cars, but that leaving those kinds of marks on the bodywork of my real E-Type was out of the question!” So, you can become a careful big kid after all… And who knows, maybe Julien has found his next subject for mechanical poetry.