Born in May 68, Martin Le Chevallier has been developing a substantial body of work since the end of the 1990s, one in which he brings his critical eye to bear on contemporary myths and ideologies.

His first work, Gageure 1.0 (Wager 1.0,1999), takes the “spectator-cum-guinea pig” through the world of corporate discourse in the form of a labyrinthine arborescence on CD-ROM. After this project, he produced a series of games (Flirt 1.0, 2000, a game of seduction made from American film noir movie excerpts; then Vigilance 1.0, 2001, a game of video surveillance) and interactive videos. During his artist residency at the French Academy in Rome in 2000-2001, he made Félicité (Bliss), an evocation of an idle utopian society, and Oblomov, a minimalist adaptation of the novel by Ivan Gontcharov. This cycle of interactive videos came to an end in 2005 with Le Papillon (The Butterfly), the story of a character whose life is upset by the impatience of viewers.

Le Chevallier often uses the very instruments and processes that characterize our times as constituent elements in his representations of them. Witness the way in which consumerist pathologies are conjured by a vocal telephone server (Doro bibloc, 2003) and the security utopia by a “coming attractions”-type trailer (Safe Society, 2003). In 2007, the artist created a “fair” piece for the Fiac, in the form of a painted wood polyptych, in an ironic tribute to the policies of Nicolas Sarkozy (NS).

Le Chevallier’s recent pieces work on the basis of an interference with reality. In this vein, he asked a consulting firm to propose a strategy for him to attain glory (The Audit, 2008); he traveled in procession to Brussels with a miraculous European flag (The Holy Flag, 2009); he secured a Tuileries Gardens pool with remote-controlled, toy police boats (Ocean Shield, 2009); and he set up viewpoint binoculars overlooking a hypermarket (“Slowing Your Blinking” exhibition, 2010).

As a counterpoint to these contextual projects, the artist has pursued his film work. A case in point is “2008” (2010), at once a film and an installation, which presents a picaresque narrative of globalisation.

Gageure 1.0
1999
Cdrom
Wager 1.0 is an existence simulator. It allows you, at least for a little while, to forget the fear of emptiness we all share. You will momentarily feel you exist, you will feel fulfilled, you will be someone. And the recipe is simple: just believe in your work.
This metaphor takes the form of a CD Rom. Why? Dilbert provides the answer in a question: “But how did we ever pretend to work before the computer?”(1) Today, two out of three salaried employees sit behind computers, which have become the industrial tool par excellence. So when you consult Wager 1.0, it will look like you’re working. And you are going to play with an employer who is at once anonymous, unpredictable and inflexible: the computer.
The cathode-ray face of your interlocutor is perfectly unwrinkled. The basic colors of video, a few pixels for typography: we’re the target of curt remarks from uniform screens.
The machine addresses us directly. It promises professional and personal enrichment. This promise is a form of propaganda. It is the propaganda of contemporary capitalism: management-speak. This language guarantees the centrality of work. It reassures us with a jargon of motivational euphemisms, and invites us to conform to its models of success.
The promised success never comes. First confronted with the simulacrum of a job interview, ignorant of what the machine holds in store, we slowly discover the labyrinthine structure of Wager 1.0. Players of games as alienating as work or consumption, spectators of the eternal imagery of happiness, we can only acknowledge the vanity of our dreams of fulfillment.
Using the principle of hypertext, this pathway through associations of ideas offers a non-linear reading, a vagabond thinking.