The Galerie Eva Vautier is delighted to present, for the second time, a solo exhibition by the artist Marc Chevalier.
The Galerie Eva Vautier is delighted to present, for the second time, a solo exhibition by the artist Marc Chevalier. Following his first exhibition in 2020, Les tableaux n’existent pas, in which he pushed the limits of painting, Marc Chevalier now offers a dialogue between recent works, created especially for this occasion, and older pieces. A graduate of the Villa Arson in Nice in 1993, Marc Chevalier took part in founding La Station (artist-run space) in 1996. After an artistic path that took him from Paris to Berlin, he returned to Nice in 2012, where he continues his experiments today. For him, the idea does not precede the work: it is worked out during its making, through actions and reactions between form and content. An artist of protean practice, he explores different modes of expression, refusing to limit himself to a single artistic language; thus, through a sculpture, one can glimpse the lingering traces of a drawing, a painting or a performance. Each work bears witness to a multi-medium inspiration, through which the viewer’s perception is built and refined. Marc Chevalier sets in motion a process of stepping back; he invites us to experience an active contemplation. Text by Christian Bernard Marc Chevalier, or the nostalgia of today Marc Chevalier’s exhibition, Pouvoir faner, vouloir fleurir, is presented in two dissimilar sets, logically housed in the two main spaces of the Galerie Eva Vautier. First paintings, then sculptures. Another series of paintings is shown upstairs. Paintings without paint, pictures without canvas What the artist calls “tableaux” are, to quote him, “paintings without a drop of paint”: paintings made with advertising adhesive tapes, more or less translucent, stretched over the frame with no other support. The “pictorial” layer dispenses with the canvas. The printed elements on the adhesive tapes provide the colour, and the tapes themselves serve as the canvas. Here we see all of M. Chevalier’s deconstructive craftsmanship. The series of small square pictures (20 x 20 cm) shown here sits halfway between image and abstraction. Words slip in everywhere (those of advertising, a particular use of language and of signs), contributing to the dynamic structuring of the surfaces. Most often, lines radiating from the central zone produce an image-sensation of explosion, vortex, maelstrom, which may recall certain Suprematist or Constructivist works, as well as the graphic style of advertising communication or political propaganda between the two world wars. A tension is knotted there that seems ready to spill beyond the frame, so dominant is the idea of movement. From school days (at the Villa Arson, in this case), Chevalier set out to continue painting by means other than colour applied to canvas. His first “scotch” pictures date from that period. The adhesive tapes used then were simply monochrome and the lines they materialised were organised orthogonally. Colour merged with form. Geometric abstraction…
