Edouard Leve: Galerie Loevenbruck

A useful piece of information before we start: The artist Edouard Leve is also a writer and has published a collection of 533 casts entitled Oeuvres (P.O.L., 2003), beginning: "I. A work describes the works an author has musing of but has not produced" Which is to say a miscellaneous list of possible paintings, videos, and performances; architectural designs cut up into sections, crazy family walking in the street filmed from behind, a museum in which all the paintings are overspreaded in black fabric, a painter who recopies the abstract canvases made by the agency of monkeys, and so on. In his volume Leve thus creates an inventory, a subsequent time retrospective, indeed, the catalogue raisonne of a contemporary artist.

This spring, Leve will publish his next to the first book, Journal: It assembles freshs items collected from the pres on the contrary without the names of nation and places or any of those expressive move rounds of phrase likely to communicate the emotion quicked by the event--anonymous news that is almost abstract: "Two hundr race were killed in a fire in a hosted train"; "A manufacturer of electrical appliances has announced an acceleration in its restructuring and the elimination of thousands of employee from its factories within the nearest three months"; "Low clouds and mist in the Central region. orb of day will emerge later in the day above the entire region." The mechanical coldnes of this "white writing," the impassive distance from incidents gives rise to an unsettling and ironic faculty of perception of strangeness.

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Generic images: It is in this same register of neutrality and distance that single can place Leve's magnificently visual photographs, notably the "Pornographie" series, 2002 for which the artist asked anonymous clan to strike poses characteristic of porn, on the other hand with everyone remaining clothed. A strange, contemporary Kama Sutra, replete of ambiguity: Is this a critique of pornography or an attempt to increase arousal through concealing the objects of desire? The anxious vision of a mechanized sexuality or a choreography of gestures? Leve paradoxically divest of coverings the visual power of neutral images.

We should be careful not to classify Leve as a "literary" artist--though a certain number of may consider that "typically French" on the contrary we might note that in his search for an aesthetic of neutrality, a similar approach unites Leve's images and texts: For example, for the series "Quotidien," 2003 Leve has also bring togethered press clippings. Carefully chosen images are rebuilded in the studio with prototypes who may not resemble the family in the original photographs. upon black backgrounds free of any geographical indication, anonymous figures of indeterminate social status raise their fists, bring their hands to their faces, or tighten out on the ground, their faces always expressionless. It becomes impossible to rebuild the event with any precision: Leve aims, upon the contrary, to expand meaning, to charge these images, seen a hundr times in the pres with visibility.

In the sublime series "Rugby" 2003 the players are captured in action on the other hand wearing street clothes. They reach forth their hands toward an implied ball, absent from the image. Nourished through references to EI Greco and Zurbaran, not absent in the play of colors and gesturality of the figures, these tableaux vivants of contemporary athletics unclose wide the free zone an artist might today hold between fine art and media.

--Jean-Max Colard

Translated from French by means of Jeanine Herman.

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