Li Chevalier

Born 1961. Beijing, China

Franco-Chinese artist Li Chevalier employs Chinese ink in original ways, creating shadowy and ephemeral images that exist on the boundary between landscapes and abstraction. Her works play on a figure / ground tension displaying chalky streaks and minute gestures that recall nocturnal vibrations as well as stained materials, in the manner of Toshimitsu Imai’s “controlled accidents”.
The field of vision widens, flickers and closes in again on zones sometimes mineral, at others starry, under the unpremeditated assault of ink, which at times she combines with acrylic, sand or collage.
At times one may perceive a vague silhouette emerging from a hazy mist, or perhaps a lonely Christian cross knocked over by the breeze, evocative of a Breton Pardon ceremony. At another, invocations of water or magma slide out of the frame. Overall, what prevails is an atmosphere, a presence. There is a sort of melancholy, a deceptive distance, but above all a true mastery. They are essentially evocative, grave and secretive images, rooted in nature. We are left in no doubt that Li Chevalier has created her own world.
At the intersection of two universes: one imbued with the wisdom of her original China, and one informed by reactions and backlashes from her Western experience, Li Chevalier assumes this “entre deux,” in order to express her special relationship to art and nature.
She chose Chinese ink as her medium, attacking the white of her canvas, freeing the feverish percussion of her “collage” and the studied scale of her vaporous forms. By revealing the spontaneity of her hand and her thoughts (or her hand as thought), she reveals her inner gaze. Li Chevalier is indeed this painter of familiar strangeness, whose rare work continues to play in our imaginations, long after we leave it behind.