Miguel Chevalier (born April 22, 1959, in Mexico) is a French digital and virtual artist. Since 1978, Miguel Chevalier has used computers as a means of expression in the field of the visual arts. He has established himself internationally as one of the pioneers of virtual and digital art.
His multidisciplinary and experimental work addresses the question of immateriality in art, as well as the logics induced by computers, such as hybridization, generativity, interactivity, networking. He develops different themes in his work, such as the relationship between nature and artifice, the observation of flux and networks organizing our contemporary societies, the imaginary of architecture and virtual cities, the transposition of patterns from Islamic art into the digital world. The images he offers perpetually question our relationship to the world.
His works are most often presented in the form of digital installations projected at a large scale. He creates in-situ works that revisit the history and architecture of places through digital art, giving them a new interpretation. He also creates sculptures using 3D printing or laser cutting techniques, which materialize his virtual universes.
Miguel Chevalier has been featured in numerous exhibitions in museums, art centers and galleries all over the world. He also carries out projects in public and architectural spaces.
Biography
Childhood and youth
Miguel Chevalier spent his childhood in Mexico where his father was a university researcher studying the history of Latin America. The cultural and artistic environment in which he grew up enabled the emergence of an early interest in art. Regular visitors to the family home included muralists David Alfaro Siqueiros, Rufino Tamayo or Diego Rivera, director Luis Buñuel and architect Luis Barragán, whose violent use of color would significantly influence the artist. The influence of Mexican artists is subsequently noticeable in the monumental dimension of the artist's works, as well as in the attention he pays to the integration of his art into the public space.
During his teenage years he followed his parents to Madrid, where his father took over the management of the Casa de Vélazquez. He discovers with great passion the treasures of Churrigueresque architecture, as well as the European masters' paintings in museums. At the Prado Museum, Miguel Chevalier has the opportunity to discover Goya's work, which he describes as an emotional shock. The reproduction technique as a series such as The Disasters of War impacts him deeply him, much like Andy Warhol's the silkscreened works. In 1974 he also discovered the work of the Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez opening him to kinetic art.
He then moved to Paris, whose cultural richness and numerous exhibitions (including the one on Marcel Duchamp in 1977 and the famous Paris-New York, Paris-Moscow and Paris-Berlin at the Centre Georges Pompidou) struck him as a revelation.
Training
Miguel Chevalier joined the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts of Paris in 1978 where he learned the basics of drawing and sculpture, where he graduated in 1981. Two years later he graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs as well as obtaining a license in art and archeology at the University of Paris La Sorbonne as well as in plastic art at the University of Paris Saint-Charles.
The completion of Miguel Chevalier's training also included a few stays abroad: the Pratt Institute and the School of Visual Arts in New York, thanks to the Lavoisier scholarship from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1984. In the United States, the French artist finally gains access to the first computer-assisted drawing software and realizes the imminent computer revolution about to transform the artistic approach to painting, photography and video. Likewise, his stays at the Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto, Japan, from 1993 to 1994, proved to be fundamental in intensifying his relationship with nature which he had already experienced as omnipresent and luxuriant in Latin America and he encountered in the Kyoto's zen gardens like an artificial kingdom where everything is controlled in detail.
Career
While the end of the 1970s marks a return to painting through free figuration and graffiti, Miguel Chevalier seeks to generate a new pictorial subject in the field of painting. With the increased presence of computers in the media and the beginning of the Information Society at the beginning of the 1980s, Miguel Chevalier then invests the field of digital art thanks to computers which allow him to modify, animate and experiment with images endlessly. However, the access to IT tools remained difficult.