Jérémy Chevalier

Rock music, which Jérémy Chevalier has played, is the main source of inspiration in his work as an artist. His humorous and derisive objects, installations, performances and videos bring to light the instruments, tools, gestures and codes used in the entertainment industry, as well as the derived effects, failures and accidents it produces. His inventiveness also draws from his training as an electronic engineer, which enables him to transform into a one-man band fitted out with loudspeakers, or to invent a microphone that lights up when spoken into, or to grill sausages using the power generated by him playing the electric guitar. In doing so, he highlights the way the body relates to music, sound diffusion, electrical circuits and kinetic energy. In his performances, the ordinary movements of a singer, a guitarist or a DJ are discreetly “under-performed” rather than performed, and staged amidst revealing mise-en-scènes, piles of cassette tapes, multiple screens, duplicated images showing what goes on behind the scenes, the anti-spectacular, and the technical, textual and physical obstacles that need to be overcome. For Concrete Music, the artist reproduced the grooves of vinyl records on concrete disks that can be read on a real turntable. What we hear playing is the ghost of a piece of music, barely audible albeit at times recognisable, haunted by innumerable crackles that we hone into almost tactilely as the needle grazes the concrete’s asperities. The objects that the artist produces bear the trace, the imprint of an often paradoxical gesture, between obliteration and revelation: a music box smoothed down and reduced to silence, CDs stamped with the lyrics to a song, erased texts whose residual downstrokes seem to send out an echo, moulded concrete notebooks that still hold traces of the pressed-in writing on the surface of the paper. Remnant, trace, vanishing, nostalgia, desire…

Translated by Lucy Pons