The Caveman / Levalet

Rue de Houdain, 1 - 7000 Mons

Charles Leval, known as Levalet, was born in Epinal in 1988. He grew up in Guadeloupe, where he discovered urban culture and was introduced to the plastic arts. He went on to study visual arts in Strasbourg, where his work, which at the time focused more on video, was nourished by his assiduous theatrical practice, the visual and narrative language of which is preserved in his urban works. He obtained his agrégation in 2012, the year in which his work began to take to the streets of Paris and beyond. Since 2013, he has been exhibiting in galleries and taking part in international urban events. Levalet's work is primarily concerned with drawing and installation. He stages his characters drawn in Indian ink in the public space through a game of visual and semantic dialogue with the present environment. The characters interact with the architecture, unfolding in situations that often verge on the absurd, and the work is mesmerising in its technical mastery. These preliminary studies are done in Indian ink, a technique that suffers from no imprecision. The black line, without nuance, is unleashed in the attitudes and movements of the characters who literally invade the windows of the façade.

Somewhere between realism and surrealism, the artist presents a series of disconcerting anachronisms. It is more an installation than a fresco in the strict sense of the word, in the way the artist takes advantage of the different planes of the façade to set the scene for his narrative. Each sketch functions as a veritable page-through of the space, with at least three levels of reading, each level completely disconnected from the next. All three scenes reproduce the same storyline: a wilderness background against which a half-statuary, half-modern silhouette stands out in greyness, replicating itself in trompe-l'œil in the foreground. There, we first think we see the natural gestures of almost living figures sitting right on the windowsill, only to realise on a second reading that the attitudes are inspired by prehistoric men dressed in modern costume. The three windows together offer the viewer a burlesque sketch of the history of our Western society: ‘This installation,’ explains the artist, ‘evokes in an allegorical and humorous way both the extent to which modern man has become unsuited to a potential return to the state of nature, and the fact that although the civilised world has changed our environment enormously, the profound nature of Homo sapiens remains the same as it was in prehistoric times’. Without realising it, the artist is creating a kind of parody of our times at the very place where this story of man's gradual retreat from nature was born. Indeed, the UNESCO recognition of the Neolithic site at Spiennes, in the commune of Grand Mons, is based on sedentarisation, the extraction and exploitation of minerals, and finally on specialisation in the manufacture and marketing of these products. Are these not the foundations of our present-day society in the midst of crisis, the subject of Levalet's fresco?

L'art habite la Ville