ART-PRESENTATION: Claude Lévêque-Aube Bleue

Claude Lévêque work refers to popular culture, to the everyday environment, and to mental images. He creates ambiances, environments and objects while expanding the installation’s dimensions through the use of the sensory effectiveness of light and sound. Playing on the ability of the works to provoke visual and sensory emotions, he shakes up the perceptual and reactive habits of the cultural references necessary to his creation.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Kamel Mennour Archive

The essential part of Claude Lévêque’s work consists of installations which articulate objects, sounds and lights that take possession of places and spectators, the same applies his exhibition “Aube bleue” at Château La Coste. After pushing aside a curtain, the visitor enters to a room lit only by the halo emanating from a single flower in neon outline, floating in the dark space like a dream vision. The voice of Catherine Deneuve giving an a cappella rendition of Mon amie la rose by Françoise Hardy echoes through the space. It is Lévêque’s way of making her portrait, not with her image but rather with her own soft, smooth voice. Lévêque has often used light and sound in his works. He makes use of pop song as a deep reservoir of references and signs, endowed with a strong evocative power, and led here by the voice of Catherine Deneuve, that carries the listener beyond the music itself. Like a modern Romantic, Lévêque tells us about the arc of life and death, and the feeling of vertigo we experience when faced with the idea of vanishing. No need for images, if not in the stylised form of a flower quivering with electricity…

Steeped at the time in the punk movement, new wave music, alternative rock, the alternative avant-garde and counter-culture in general, Claude Lévêque was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts in Bourges in 1970. At the end of that decade, he was involved with the artistic programming at the Nevers Maison de la Culture, where he exhibited major artists in the Body Art movement (Gina Pane, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Michel Journiac) and organised concerts and experimental film programmes. In 1982, he took part for the first time in a group show, at the Créteil Maison des Arts with an installation, Grand Hotel, which immediately attracted the attention of the art critic Michel Nuridsany. He subsequently developed a multi-facetted oeuvre presenting a deconstruction of our society’s codes and references, by means of retrieved and recycled objects. His sculptures and installations conjure up, turn by turn, themes of childhood, ideological conditioning, ritualisation of the body, human deprivation, loss and alienation, and all the resulting violence and revolt. In the 1990s, Claude Lévêque focused more on objects reflecting collective representations that were invariably alienated, not to say disembodied by the light device. He then veered towards in situ work. He developed immersive installations, where the elements drawn from reality and transfigured by light and sound form staged arrangements that summon both the subjective and the collective imagination. These arrangements bring to mind the language of film, with the movements of the viewer replacing the movement of the images. They involve all our cognitive, sensory and affective faculties, with the various elements helping to project us onto another stage – that of the imagination, games, dreams, and nightmares. In the 1990s, Claude Lévêque tended more and more to a sparseness of forms, a rigour of gesture, and an artistic vocabulary emphasising his kinship with Minimalism, especially in his way of playing with perception and giving pride of place to experiment. Light, which is omnipresent in his work, became a material in itself, with its volume, thickness and color; and the neon writings, there since 1993, became more and more salient.

Info: Château La Coste, 2750 Route de la Cride, 13610, Le Puy Ste Réparade, Duration: 27/9/20-Spring 2021, Days & Hours: Daily 13:00-17:00, https://chateau-la-coste.com