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.

THE HOLY FLAG
2009
Video, flag and installation
Shortly before Easter 2009, Martin Le Chevallier found a European flag in his home, transformed by the unexpected presence of the face of a sleeping bearded man in the middle of the circle of stars. The artist, who first sought a rational explanation for this phenomenon – to no avail – now asserts that the only possible explanation is that we are dealing with the miraculous appearance of the face of Christ. “I am neither a believer nor a mystic,” he declares, “but I had to overcome my scepticism and accept what was plain to see. We have here a divine message addressed to Europe. This face, which appears to be surrounded by the halo of the European constellation, is here to show us that the European identity is profoundly Christian”.

To bring this “message of hope and appeasement” to Europe, Le Chevalier has decided to travel in procession to Brussels to present the miraculous flag to the European institutions. A reliquary shrine has been constructed to transport the holy relic on a man’s back.