Martin Le Chevallier: Art that disturbs where it is needed

Turn the Café de Flore into a PMU bar.  Selling the French pavilion at the Venice Biennale second-hand. Installing anti-Gilets Jaunes sculptures at roundabouts... The least we can say about Martin Le Chevallier's realistic but unrealized artistic ideas is that they are not designed to make friends with whom to spend a summer of pétanque, pastis and grilled meat, spreading smoke mixed with solar oil between caravans that have been stowed away for ten years on the same campsite. Cushy.

And it's no better on the left bank where Le Chevallier will certainly never join the German-Pratin fan club of the ghosts of Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, Triolet, Aragon and Vian. So much for art. So much the better for the artist. The rejected projects of this rock'n'roll Boltanski are presented in the exhibition La Stratégie du râteau. They are so politically incorrect that the publicly displayed institutional letters of refusal of financial support almost make their authors into artists. So much so do they resurrect the divine Surrealism through their misery.

It's a question of pie in the sky. So is it enough to be provocative to be a genius? Not in the case of Le Chevallier. Because let's look at the works. Art Press invites us to go straight to the chillingly cynical 2020 series entitled Obsolete Heroes. There is something definitive about this gallery of insignificant portraits transformed into eye catchers. Drawing on photo. Old photo in today's photo. Photo of old photo in photo of today. And then fire. Fire that gains from the second plan the first one by setting fire to the photo of the photo of the photo.

Someone says it better in 4 seconds about life, death, art, the machine, glory and anonymity, the absurdity and cruelty of fate? This is why a work by Martin Le Chevallier belongs to art. Because it stands as a mirror in which photography today is reflected.

Photo: Obsolete Heroes 2020