A former student of the Villa Arson in Nice, Marc Chevalier graduated from there in 1993.
A former student of the Villa Arson in Nice, Marc Chevalier graduated from there in 1993. He took part in the creation of La Station in 1996, then moved to Paris and then Berlin. Back in Nice since 2012, it is here that he now pursues his artistic research on, among other things, the representation of words and the mental images they evoke. It is from this desire that the exhibition Les tableaux n’existent pas was born. He proposes to transcend the idea of the picture. Galerie Eva Vautier, like a singular and imperfect “white cube”, with its edges and irregularities, becomes a place of making in search of the truth of the picture’s imaginary. Somewhere between installation and performance, this proposal continues his intervention at the exhibition Supervues, in 2016, at the Hôtel Burrhus in Vaison-la-Romaine. He had then, in haste, to create a work in a hotel room. Starting from what is usually found there, neutral enough not to displease anyone but not original enough to strike the mind of the passing guest, the artist asks himself the question of the physical representation of the idea of the picture. Is it an image? A painting? A frame? What do you think of when you hear the word “tableau”? Is it a radical idea or a bourgeois one? What is the picture for? One question leading to another: must the picture serve something? What makes it beautiful or ugly? Is it a protean signified? The line drawn is an attempt, not necessarily successful, at the idea of the “tableau”. How will the need for representation take concrete form? In response to the white walls of the gallery, with the pressure of the exhibition that has to be made, lines of representation arise in haste and from the need to fill this empty surface. The gesture is meant to be instinctive, primal, even primary. The representation must be spontaneous. Marc Chevalier deliberately refuses to practise, and so form a habit, before setting down his only luggage, the gouache felt-tip, and bringing into being signs recognisable to all. Of course, the discourse has a more universal scope, tending to question the idea we have of art, of aesthetics and of our fantasised world. Exhibition view Les tableaux n’existent pas, Marc Chevalier 2020, Photo © François Fernandez Les tableaux n’existent pas l Catherine Macchi. On entering Galerie Eva Vautier and discovering the work Marc Chevalier has executed directly on the walls, without a safety net, one might say, for the exhibition Les Tableaux n’existent pas, one quickly grasps its performative dimension. Invited on the basis of a carte blanche, the artist chose not to show his studio production but rather to repeat a gesture he had first made at the Hôtel Burrhus in Vaison-la-Romaine, as part of the exhibition Supervues, in 2016. Indeed, faced at the time with a short deadline, he got out of it with one of those pirouettes at which contemporary artists excel, drawing in a single stroke with a felt-tip on the wall of a room two large abstract…
