Marc Chevalier

Né en 1967 à Paris. Vit et travaille à Nice.

Born in 1967, Paris. He's living and working in Nice.

Subpictural : Stuffpictural

Marc Chevalier's works are like smooth huge screens on which have settled cold fascinating images evoking exploits of high technology: computer dialog boxes, digital images on a plasma screen, photograph taken by satellites, sketches of an architecture of the future, medical and scientific imaging, 3D videogames, etc...
The eye slides over the surface of these mechanized image fragments searching for subtle details taken in their after all very abstract pixelized frames as if to demonstrate their logic. It may be difficult to acknowledge it, but these paintings which vie with digital screens are handmade paintings, a pair of scissors in one hand and a roll of adhesive tape in the other. The response to the fantasy of a high-tech image is thus a low-tech technique. This painting, of which nothing exists in the beginning except the stretcher, unifies in one and only gesture support and surface, form and content, colour and line by the means of a long weaving of adhesive tape. Although realised with different types of adhesive tape, which are like a substitute to painting, the work remains a space of sedimentation of layers of substance and of successive gestures. Matt, glossy, transparent, offering a wide range of colours, adhesive tape makes it possible to obtain the effects of great painting: touch, impasto, and glaze. The background of the work is generally made with regular packaging tape the light brown colour of which is not without evoking canvas. Adhesive tape, which replaces both canvas and palette , works like a makeshift job that would temporary repair the damage of painting, as you would fix up a rear view mirror with a piece of sellotape.
The lapping finally creates the birth of an image or suggests a perspective space through a network of lines of sellotape setting up an abstract perspective. These images of deepness which can evoke 3D or, in a more nostalgic manner, the founding of perspective in illusionist painting appear like pretences  saying the unrepresentability which can still exist under the form of a cosmic space only, a vortex taking birth under the glaze reflecting the reel space.   The question asked always remains the same: "What do we see whenever we hear the word painting?"

Catherine Macchi
(Translated by Patricia Emeric)
 

2008-06-22 -

lien Internet : www.lastation.org