Li Chevalier

Impermanence of All Things

online group EXHIBITION

February.24 - JUNE.26.2022

Li Chevalier, a French artist of Chinese origin, is known for her inks on canvas at the edge of landscape and abstraction. Her singular work is nourished by her artistic heritage of the Chinese landscape, to which she tries to breathe new life by using the possibilities of expression offered by contemporary Western art and its techniques. She utilizes Indian ink, not on paper as Chinese tradition dictates, but on canvas. This medium allows her to work on the texture and add other materials such as pigments, mineral chips, sand, paper.

 “…I venture into semi-abstraction where the figures
and forms are to be dissolved in the mist, symbols are to
be veiled under the half tone, beauty to be loaned without
a ‘hymn of gloria’, solitude and melancholy are to be
perceived but restrained from falling into romantic drama.”

- Li Chevalier

Chevalier’s technical and aesthetic approach has often been described by art historians and sinologists as an art of the third way; a fertile path to dialogue, to the intersection, and to mutual enrichment between Eastern and Western art. Li Chevalier herself qualifies her work as "a language of meeting": a plastic meeting - between Indian ink, typically Chinese, with the canvas, a typically Western medium - and a thematic and aesthetic  meeting - between the search for harmony cultivated by oriental art, and the expression of emotions, suffering, pathos, cultivated by Western art.

“My creation is thus faithful to an art that chooses to bypass
the real to reach the imaginary. It is a wisdom that worships
the virtue of doubt, encourages the suspension of sentence,
mistrusts arguments and confrontation, which too often
decline into violence...”

- Li Chevalier

Symbolically, Chevalier’s canvases bear the imprint of her history and reflections, which have followed her since her studies in political science and philosophy. Her semi-abstract landscapes become a way for her to express her philosophical and metaphysical concerns. Spiritual symbols are often represented such as the cross (symbol of torment, death) and torii (portals that mark the border between the secular and sacred environment, symbols of Shintoism).

Chevalier’s language links art and philosophy, and man and nature. Like the classical Chinese shanshui landscape inspired by Taoism, the human silhouettes, when present, are blurred, faded, and blended into her silent landscapes, into extended horizons. Her work invites introspection and traces the path to existential and universal reflections on the meaning and fragility of life.