A free translation

Initially, a meeting which will find its meaning only much later, when the interwoven details and the artist's footsteps will lead her on to Lucretia, in a quest for the absolute transcended by her observation upon the starting point. An object that is not only an object, but a sculpture which, details recorded by the retina, absorbed to penetrate the necessary blurred beginnings of her exploration.

This is where the artist intervenes. An artist, who explores, gropes, seeks, exposes herself, looks, conceals, who illuminates, who gives life to the dead matter.

This is when death becomes beautiful in an artistic blur chosen by the photographer, just like the pearls spread out all over where the suicide scene occurred thus chosen to erase the horror, for these pearls have nothing to do with mortuary symbols. It is here also that death, which is never trivial and even less when it is chosen voluntarily, becomes other because a fly is present. Witness of the tragedy. Witness of the gaze of the artist. Silent witness to which will be assigned an outward sign of voluntary beauty. Is the fly not a false beauty spot to reveal a pale or even translucent complexion? Or is not this sculpture, just a pretext for a legend, but also the image of what it represents: the whiteness of death?

Where is the truth? Where is the false? Do we need to know, determine, weigh, or even to examine every single detail? It is a result. A series of photos where the white of purity, first incarnated by a virgin, takes their entire place. Not one white, but many whites; clear, bright, creamy, white nuances of all kinds. White like a memory blank. Because nothing is ever entirely white, or entirely true.

The gaze of Renée Chevalier lingered one day upon Lucretia, the moment of a visit to the National Museum of art of Catalonia in Barcelona. Immediately, she felt, perceived and understood that here was a story to tell, not as far off as her meeting with the Virgin of Sainte-Luce-sur-Mer statue. She knew that she had to photograph Lucretia, capture what emerged from her and create an ode to her beauty, and by using and by keeping the initial fly, reality at a standstill, as a sign of fate. This fly that records what no camera is able to capture, namely 200 images per second. Immobile, as a revealing or concealing beauty spot, depending on whose eyes will fall upon it.

The rest is no longer in the artist's hands. It belongs to everyone moved by the point of view of Renée Chevalier, who for the past 20 years, never ceasing to question herself, to reassess the scope of her gaze, recomposing elements repeatedly broken, reinventing the known, but never explored, to redo without duplication, re-appropriate the colors and the light regardless by which means and medium to do so, and with each exhibition, in its renewal and its newness, brings a unique understanding of the world in which she lives and cogitates.

Christine Champagne October 2011

See the Exhibit on YOUTUBE

Stigmate II (Saint Sébastien)