Artist Interview: Levalet

French artist Levalet took some time to answer some questions about art, himself, Paris and his upcoming exhibition at Paris’ Géraldine Zberro Gallery.

I started including objects 6 years ago, trying to create interactions between them and papers. 

“Jeu de dupes” is not the first of a kind, I did something before including some books. 

I like to mix different media because the presence of a material object makes the whole thing completely different.

I think they come together. I show archetypal social habits as a part of my characters play. The non-sense of the positions or situations, often reflect the absurdity of social behaviors. But I want to moderate my words, the social critics is not the major aspect of my work, It just comes out when you read the picture in a special way. I’m not interested in a militant work, that’s why I don’t use words in my installations because I don’t want to close the sense of my works.

Yes, there is something like a mental struggle in some of my characters, but I think this feeling comes out much more from the situation than from characters’ expression. I try to show how a situation or an activity can be totally disconnected from the human being and what kind of misunderstanding can produce on somebody.

I’m happy to be in Paris, what this city inspires me is a part of my will to act, but I don’t think this place is better for my work than another city. I’d like to work somewhere else, to play with other kind of architecture, to see other colors… (Paris is definitely beige)

I live in Paris since 2010 and I’m used to meet other Parisian artists during events, exhibitions or for specific projects. But I don’t really think there is a “Parisian street art movement”. There are Parisian artists, working on their own.

I think the term “street art” became a big polysemous word which means nothing and a lot a things at the same time. If we speak about artists who work in public spaces, it always existed, there always been a relationship between art and public space because art has always been a social phenomena. If we speak about a movement  born in the 60-70’s with specific cultural codes, coming from the hip-hop movement, the pop culture, the success of artists ilke Banksy…Well, in this case I don’t know what exactly it is, and maybe the term “street art” is a dangerous shortcut for people who always see our artworks through this cultural filter.

I would not say my urgency is to say something special. My first motivation is the desire to make my ideas and my phantasms exist even if it’s through representation. I like the idea to give a (paper)body

to a mental projection, and that each work live his own life, totally disconnected from me.

There is some poetry in illegality because it goes against some artistic common aspects: you do something that nobody ask for, in a place who is not a place for art, you do it for free, and there is nothing to win except the relative success of your action. But I believe the most important thing for us, much more than illegality, is the quality of the location.  

I guess I wanted to be an artist, I didn’t know in which discipline because I used to play music, to dance and to do bad graffitis. I always wanted to have a kind of useless and funny job like to become a crazy scientist or a misunderstood novelist but I wasn’t good enough in science or literature.

I will run a show starting from today November 27th in Paris, at Géraldine Zberro Gallery. It’s a duo show with a French painter, Pascal Vilcollet. Next week I’ll have a print coming out with Graffitiprints and a show in this science French school I mentioned before. And for the next year I know I will be In Italy for one solo show and two festivals.