Interactions with others’ artworks and the public’s gestures: Miguel Chevalier’s digital operations. Roberta Scorranese · Corriere della Sera · 26 July 2016.
Onde Pixel, by the Mexican-born French artist, opens today at Milan’s UniCredit Pavilion as the venue turns one.
Leonardo da Vinci was among the first to speak of matter’s “turbulence”. The fascination of things “caught in movement” has traversed much of Western modernity, resurfacing like an underground river in Bernini’s sculptures, such as Rome’s Fountain of the Four Rivers, Giacomo Balla’s darting figures and the emotional alterations of Bill Viola’s videos. But Onde Pixel, opening today at Milan’s UniCredit Pavilion, has Miguel Chevalier’s gaze and therefore a further, different idea of movement.
Born in Mexico City but a Paris resident since 1985, Chevalier is a pioneer of digital art: since 1978 he has dedicated himself exclusively to computers as a means of expression. In the more recent Pavilion, in Piazza Gae Aulenti, he begins with a first section selecting works from UniCredit’s collection, including project variations, “augmented” by Chevalier’s work. Among other things he works on silk-screen prints and 3D printing, yet his creations never overlap or cancel one another. As Chiara Savorgnan explains, the point is not to narrate but to “broaden the perception of that work through the tools available, that is, technology”.
For example, alongside classical statues photographed by Mimmo Jodice, Chevalier proposes Janus, a transparent Plexiglas sculpture created by 3D-printing a three-dimensional model. It is as though the ideal of complete art, embodied in the splendid sculpture of ancient Greece and Rome, could concretely materialise through technology. Before us is a Janus extending beyond two-dimensionality, almost taking bodily form. The faces Jodice had made move through his “living” shots acquire another, motor quality here.
The exhibition then leads to Onde Pixel. It creates a carpet of moving particles on the Pavilion floor, a swarm of colours and changing forms accompanied by music made for the occasion by composer Jacopo Baboni Schilingi, Milanese but Parisian by adoption. “Approach it with personality, with character. Do not seek a final destination or mere curiosity, but inhabit this space because the movement of the pixels on the ground and the music change according to your position and the way you occupy the space,” Chevalier says. Once again, movement.
Chevalier’s every creation contains a small life process, as Serena Massimi, responsible for Pavilion activities, puts it.
“The truth,” the artist says, “is that since your Lucio Fontana changed art history forever, inventing the spatial concept culminating in going beyond the support, we contemporaries have had only new territories left to explore. Every creative person must tell the story of their time with the means available. I have computers and digital technology, an increasingly refined world.”
This is the challenge of [the clipping’s column break interrupts the sentence]: art as an affirmation of a city. If you walk on coloured diamonds shifting as you pass, gathering in geometric figures or becoming paradisical; if you choose to cross in a straight line or obliquely the black-and-white labyrinth, you bring visions and sounds to life.
As in nature, much of Chevalier’s experimentation concerns dynamism and observation of natural phenomena. Installations from his Sur-Nature series populate the planet like “fruits of development in algorithms and genetics”, inspired by research “studying and simulating plant growth”, explains curator Domenico Quaranta in the accompanying text. Every Chevalier creation changes language not for sterile, self-contained innovation, but to narrate a world that changes continually. It begins with cities, the vegetable universe, its sources of inspiration, networks and information flows, and above all the obsession with images’ dynamics.
“These are statement-works,” he says, “from the abundance of images facing everyone today. Some will be forgotten, others will return, amplifying a contemporary event, an unexpected explosion of an image or a repetition, persistence.” A razor-sharp photograph of our everyday lives.
Pull quote: “Repetition is an image’s only condition of existence today: its persistence.”
Onde Pixel—The Gaze of Miguel Chevalier, UniCredit Pavilion, Piazza Gae Aulenti 10, Milan, from today until 28 August. Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.–7 p.m., free admission. Telephone 800 184949; www.unicreditpavilion.it.
Caption: the exhibition includes Chevalier’s site-specific installation for the Pavilion, inspired by UniCredit’s art collection, with music composed by Jacopo Baboni Schilingi; above, Janus, transparent Plexiglas, from Jodice’s photographs of classical statues.