First monograph dedicated to artist and filmmaker Martin Le Chevallier: a thorough introduction to his entire body of work (films, site-specific interventions, interactive pieces, performances and processes).
Utopies provides insight into the multiple issues and threads running through his body of work—be they political, poetic, or fanciful—and it examines the collage, détournement and parasitical practices he puts into play to generate a different way of looking at the contemporary world. The reader will find here a portfolio, an introductory text by art critic and curator Jean-Marc Huitorel, and an inventory of the artist's production from 1999 to 2016. Each piece is described and documented with images, technical specifications, diagrams, and transcriptions of texts from the works.
Martin Le Chevallier was born in May 1968. He came to the field contemporary art at the end of the 1990s after working as a graphic designer. Interactivity informed his early pieces: a game of video surveillance, a parody of an automatic voice response system, interactive videos, etc. He then turned to films and video installations, treating questions of utopia, globalization, or political beliefs with a unique mix of humor and poetry. Simultaneously, he created a whole series of process- or context-based works: he had himself audited by a consulting firm; he secured a pool in the Tuileries Gardens with toy-size remote-controlled patrol boats; he set up bleachers in the window of a gallery to suggest that the world is a theater, etc. Martin Le Chevallier lives and works in Paris.
