a spiritual verticality . li chevalier

LI CHEVALIER . background of the project

Gustav Mahler discovered in 1907 a collection of Chinese poems published in German by Hans Bethge: “Die Chinesische Flöte” (The Chinese Flute). The composer was particularly struck by six texts, four of which written by Li Bai. He felt an urge to articulate these poems, dating back to the 8th century, in a new symphonic work: it was to become “Das Lied von der Erde”, or “The Song of the Earth”.

A century later, it is this title that Li Chevalier uses to present a series of experimental paintings in ink on canvas. By plastically reactivating the dialogue between the Austrian composer and the Chinese poet, she inserts her own subjectivity into a subtle art of going beyond, crossing geographical, technical, material and immaterial borders, as her work flourishes between stable boundaries. This rare tripartite exchange covers a double dimension, a transcultural and transdisciplinary horizontality intersecting with a spiritual verticality.

A transcultural and transdisciplinary alloy Mahler’s “Song of the Earth” emerged at a particularly sinister period in his professional and personal life. He was mourning his daughter, facing the discovery of his own heart disease, and was forced to resign from the direction of the Vienna State Opera. In arranging music around poems, he found a bittersweet consolation: “The Song to Drink from the Sorrows of the Earth” (Li Bai), “The Lonely in Autumn” (Qian Qi), “The Farewell” (Meng Haoran & Wang Wei…

Li Bai in his work particularly enjoys mixing elation and sadness, which finds a scathing echo in Mahler’s existential crisis. This poetic-musical corpus notes the evanescence of earthly beauty, sending its inhabitants back to the most categorical finitude. Moreover, the musicologist Theodor W. Adorno considers that Mahler finds in these Chinese poems a “costume” allowing him to address the feeling of uprooting and constrained otherness accompanying his Jewish identity.

French painter, born in China, former singer of Peking Opera, Li Chevalier divides her life between two continents and has been confronted to Western culture since her youth. It is thus through this Euro-Asian confluence that she reinvests the pictorial tradition of her country of origin, drawing a sensitive chord between visual art and her passion for music. Who says passion, says pathos and therefore suffering: the historical dramas which marked China and her childhood condemn her pictorial universe to answer fatally and in echo, to this melancholic and romantic tone of the Song of the Earth: by singing the pain, she enchants it.

In Chinese painting, landscape genre is a major art, turned towards nature, but nature always and forever as a theater of the soul state. Straddling two cultural backgrounds, Chevalier’s modes of pictorial expression become entangled, and create a new language, turned towards the other, a harmony that transcends borders and paradoxes. In half-tones, on the threshold of monochrome, the artist constantly negotiates the tension between the sobriety (one could say modesty) of oriental art and the exalted lyricism of European (post-) romanticism. Li Chevalier finds refuge in an in-between, exclamations become suggestions, violence is contained.

By reappropriating the exceptional fluidity of ink and applying it on canvas, a theoretically incompatible European artefact, she opens a new field of aesthetic and sensory exploration, without ever abandoning one or the other culture.

I HEAR THE WATER DREAMING (DETAIL) . Li Chevalier fotografia e mixed media, 2019

It is thanks to an extra-European inspiration that Gustave Malher’s “The Song of the Earth” marks the apogee of post-Romanticism; by revisiting it, Li Chevalier tends her brushes towards the ideal muses of poetry and music, offering us landscapes of the soul that reach a sonic dimension.

Touching the depths: a spiritual verticality? If Li Chevalier’s “Song of the Earth” extends beyond Mahler’s work and covers other types of moods, she revisits the romantic power by always remaining below the threshold of implosion.

In Li Bai, the companion of melancholy is drunkenness, containing a form of duplicity. First, it is a fleeting escape route that blurs the absurd and the nausea. The cruel clarity of existential unease is diluted into the comfort of the spirit mist, as is the watery fluidity of the ink. On the other hand, the effect caused by the encounter with a work of art can also be akin to the ecstasy of the alcoholic refuge. It is the diffuse intensity of China ink that is then the most subtle messenger of this timeless anxiety.

Li Chevalier’s painting technique carries, in itself, a metaphysical vertigo since it is a reconciliation with the restrained tradition of a country which saw the birth and suffering of countless painters throughout the throes of the Cultural Revolution. Her journey joins Mahler’s questions about uprooting, disenchantment, loneliness. She regularly includes almost figurative motifs, a question mark, an empty chair, a lonely figure marching through the desert, indicative of a past or future presence, mixing nostalgia with desire. A form of resignation mocks the ambition to live indefinitely through her works and subscribes to the sentence called by Mahler: “dark is life, dark is death.”

If the search for meaning cannot lead to a tangible solution, the reflective process remains essential. Hence Victor Hugo: “The man who does not meditate lives in blindness, the man who meditates lives in darkness, in both cases we only have the choice of black ...”.

The art of contemplation encourages us to become aware of our place, Any but entire, within an immense macrocosm. The artist and the observer-spectator come together in an emotion that remains in suspense, in front of the precipice, in front of Olympus, a combination of the tragic and the sublime.

Roman Knerr

◀ SILENT WOODS Li Chevalier fotografia e mixed media, 2021

SOUND OF THE TREES Li Chevalier fotografia e mixed media, 2021

RACHMANIOFF ISLE OF THE DEATH Li Chevalier fotografia e mixed media, 2021

French Artist born in China in 1961, graduated from Byam Shaw London Central St. Martins College of Art & Design and gained her Post graduate degree in philosophy at Sorbonne University Paris. Li Chevalier has been living and working in various continents and countries between Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

Ink experimental ink painting The major area of research of Chevalier is semi-abstract ink painting on canvas. She reduces to maximum the use of brushes, magnifying expressionist quality of water lyricism, explores fluidity, the subtlety of ink and wash, avoids realistic representation however without pushing her art to total abstraction. She adopts naturally curved shapes rather than hard edges. The transparent grey and fluid brush strokes, suggestive of cascading water, which is simultaneously controlled and uncontrollable, can be seen as a metaphorical language for fate.

To extend all the possible expressive power of ink painting, Chevalier works on canvas rather than on rice paper, integrating a textured surface (pigments, mineral chips, sand, paper collage and calligraphy). Other experimentation led her to the diversification of formats, from small to monumental, from rectangular to square. Finally, a scenic touch allows her ink paintings to occupy the whole exhibition space, approaching the spirit of installation.

Symbolism and landscapes of soul To the opposite of French Garden which is a “truth” based on rationalist expression of mathematical reason, the spiritual garden Chevalier tends to create could be compared to the virginal nature of the Payne spirit cherished by Western romanticism: intuition is preferred to intellectual order; spontaneity prevails over geometric proportion. Her landscape of soul expresses a “philosophical astonishment”. Instead of an onto-theological assertion, the artist depicts “Toris”, spiritual gates of Japanese temples, or a scholar’s bench at the summit of a mountain, inviting the viewer to afford a short spiritual retreat. The Christian cross witnesses the irresistible human impulse toward transcendence. The artist claims to be profoundly contemporary but wishes to offer an alternative to aesthetic nihilism.

Between music and visual art At the age of 15, she was chosen by the Chinese army opera troop to be trained in singing. The music remains her passion alongside her professional practice as a visual artist. She was soprano in the choir of the Orchestra de Paris under the direction of Arthur Oldham and Semyon Bychkov.

She has collaborated with the musicians of the Paris Opera since 1991 and staged numerous visual – musical art events. Music is one of the recurrent themes in her works, notably: her monumental installation “Cantabile per archi”, tribute to Latvian composer Peteris Vasks, was presented at the China National Opera in Beijing, in collaboration with musicians from Paris Opera and China Symphony Orchestra in 2013.

RACHMANINOV THE ISLE OF THE DEAD Li Chevalier fotografia e mixed media, 2020

DOPO LA PIOGGIA . Francesco Cubeddu fotografia aerea, 2021