Miguel Chevalier

Texts by Mario Costa, Edmond Couchot, Gunnar B. Kvaran, Ariella Masboungi, Mohamed Rachdi

“Miguel Chevalier is one of the most distinctive artists today, largely owing to what he calls his “re-creations of nature”. As with many of his esteemed predecessors, Chevalier implements time and light as the raw materials of his artistic experiments and development –as tools to grapple with our natural surroundings. Yet Chevalier notably pushes the envelope in a new direction through his incorporation of software, which becomes amazing creative processes. This digital emphasis has its own life, initiated by the artist, but without any attempt to conceal its overtly technological origins and mechanisms. Conceptually, Chevalier produces work that functions as a simulacrum of nature: nothing is preconceived but meanders instead as an unpredictable proliferation of the digital landscape. His works are about life, mutation, transition and perpetual movement, which in their architectural and environmental installations includes, incorporates or even engulfs the spectator through interactive dialogues, and confront him with the architecture scale and the urban spaces all around the world (Paris, Bueno Aires, Seoul, Eindhoven, Mumbai…) […]

In his work, especially the installations, he draws viewers into specific “social realities” where the artwork is actualised and the viewers made conscious of their own existence within peculiar environments. The end result is to highlight the artificiality of our lived environment, from brimming urban growth to the ceaseless reconditioning of nature. We can therefore say that Miguel Chevalier pursues in a most original way a strain of “technological humanism” that comprises an important aspect of our most topical modern art. Sharply aware of his historical context, but also concerned to break with tradition, Chevalier recomposes visions of unity in a fresh social space where he invites the public to take part in inter-subjective relationships, and to work towards an increasingly dynamic type of phenomenological communication.”( p30-31 Gunnar B. Kvaran, Nature & Artifice)

Miguel Chevalier & Authors, Miguel Chevalier, France, 2008

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