Mexico City, Mexico, 1959

More than the inexhaustible use of digital artifice, we invariably find in Miguel Chevalier’s creations a mysterious aura that recalls magicians of all ages. Because his work always retains the power to invest the virtual of an agency not always foreseen in him, capable of forging imaginary spaces incorporated into the extensive spaces and infusing life into other natures that seem to unfold by virtue of their own alvitre, free from the one that once I had imagined them.

Chevalier begins this endless adventure of making the digital medium of the ambitions of the artistic imagination in the early 1980s, when computers still occupied entire rooms. Since then, his work has been developed in the temporality of digital technique, incorporating its ever-changing powers in order to give breath to an art form that seeks to exceed the confines of its themes and involve its users in order to make them life-giving elements of its own constructions. In this way, it is worth mentioning, among countless incursions, the renewed approach that Chevalier gives to the natural world. No longer limited to representing it, the artist uses technical artifice to create second natures, paradoxical reminiscences of our natural world. His series of Habiers are works like this, a collection of virtual plants that are born from “digital seeds”, live their multicolored splendor and wither according to a “morphogenetic code” programmed by the artist; or even installations such as Sur-Natures and Ultra-Nature, in which the flowers interact with the spectators, who, as the guardian of the Eolo winds, make them sway and dance to the taste of gestures. The same principles are also applied to the various Fractal Flowers, flowers that bloom governed by the self-similarity of the shapes of fractal geometry and which, caught in an imponderable moment, are suddenly transubstantiated, as a result of 3D printing technology, in a solid body, receiving then palpability and permanence.

Combined with this naturalism of the artifice whose objects are dreamed natures, Chevalier’s work has the indisputable effect of producing the marvelous by transforming space through the virtual. This secret force acts fully in its Magic Carpets, luminous projections on the floors that mold themselves to architectural spaces to transform them, involving those who cross these enchanted rugs in the spectacle of images and colors. A similar event produced the Digital Arabesques, variations of Magic Carpets that find inspiration for a ballet of brilliant shapes in the geometry of Islamic arabesques. This interaction and reformulation of the architectural space also takes place through projections on the facades of buildings, as in the case of monumental versions of Sur-Natures, or in the unexpected use of architectural elements from a particular environment to produce an unexpected fragment of the universe, as in Digital Supernova 2019, which transformed the Gothic vaults of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Rodez into unfathomable celestial cartographies.

But, in addition to using the virtual as a creative and transforming instance of space, Chevalier’s work also moves in the opposite direction by unveiling those virtual presences that already adhere to what is concrete. This is present in a series of works gathered under the name of Meta-Cities in which the artist abstracts megalopolises from their physical presence to retain their images in their real-time transport, data and exchange flows that point to a rethink of urban space. This attention to the recondite structures of the current world is also found in the various installations La Vague des Pixels, in which the artist thematizes the digital itself through meta-references to its constitutive elements and its mathematical symbology, so that the pixels on the panels are shaken and captured by the movements of the spectators.

Thus, Miguel Chevalier’s work in all its processes, in its imaginative and abstract culminations allows us to overcome the supposed opposition between virtual and real, raising to sensitive evidence the invisible fabric that covers our days, these flows and networks of zeros and ones that provide the measure and speed of our time while creating and generating, in their incessant dynamics, our way of being.

VRP