Marc Chevalier was born in Paris on August 28, 1967. He then lived in the Poitou region of France and when it was time for him to go to art school, he chose the Villa Arson in Nice. “Because, he said, of the excellent reputation it had. He graduated in 1993, but stayed at the Villa for two more years as a resident. Already, he wants to create, to paint. It remains to be defined how. He is convinced that it cannot be like before. The act of painting is now in question, open to a multiplicity of practices that analyze it, deconstruct it, question it. Marc’s answers will come through practice. It is by doing that he will find. For the time being, he participates in the creation of the Station, a group that brings together young artists from Nice. Then he leaves Nice. His life and his creation continue in Paris and Berlin. […] If he has travelled, his thinking remains the same. It is based on an observation; “a feeling of emptiness of meaning” [in documentsdartistes.org, 1998]. The values received, the discourse and the artistic representations give voice to a strange silence, a vacancy that opens up once their literality is overcome. What is at stake beyond words and their immediate meanings? What can images mean? Hence Marc’s question: “I began by thinking about symbolic values and symbols without values? “According to him, the writing that he invented represents “the existence of an unformulable reality” which Wittgenstein had the intuition and on which the principle of his aesthetics is based: “What can be shown cannot be said”. Hence Marc’s conclusion: “The nonsense of a word that speaks suggests a painting that reflects on itself while being made; the painting makes its own criticism, begins a discourse on itself in a discourse that, through a talkative metalanguage, attempts to define something irreducible to language. »
Excerpt from the article “Les bonheurs du simulacre”, by Michel Franca, journalist
Impressions d’ateliers, LA CRÉATION CONTEMPORAINE SUR LA CÔTE D’AZUR, by Patrick Boussu, coordinator of the book, Michel Francan journalist and Jean-Michel Sordello, photographer, South Art Éditions
