Interview with Levalet - The Hunt - Bologna, CHEAP Festival 2015

Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
CLICK HERE FOR ITALIAN VERSION

Interview with Levalet

The Hunt 

Bologna, CHEAP Festival, May 2015

As part of the third edition of the Bologna CHEAP Festival, Festival of Street Poster Art, the French poster artist Levalet (born as Charles Leval) has produced an art creation on one of the buildings of access to the parking lot of Piazza Azzarita in Bologna. The title of the installation is The Hunt.

The Hunt is composed of about thirty hand-painted figures in black ink on paper, installed on the wall with the technique of paste up.

You will find below images of the work.

By clicking here you can access the personal website of Levalet (in English): http://www.levalet.xyz/

At this link, moreover, you can find the notes (in Italian) on The Hunt as published by the CHEAP organizing team: 

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.891804604212719.1073741894.462149573844893&type=1

To us the work of Levalet seemed particularly intriguing, which is why we decided to contact and propose him an interview. We thank him for having accepted (and equally, we would like to express gratitude to the organizers of CHEAP for establishing the contact). (Giovanni Mazzaferro)

INTERVIEW WITH LEVALET

Q. Why, in the realm of Street Art, did you choose the method of ink drawing on poster? Can we say that yours are monumental graphic works?

A. I chose this technique because it allows me to prepare my drawings in my workshop under the best conditions, to quickly draw with Indian ink and then paste very quickly my installations. Normally, my works are not so large; so, more than monuments, I would call them graphical set-ups.

D. Did you revisit old masters in any of your works? Is the rhinoceros of your 'The Hunt' a direct descendant of the Rhinoceros by Albrecht Dürer?

A. I studied fine arts and art history and thus references to the past, in particular to classical painting, appear in my work even beyond my conscious intentions. For this work, obviously I thought of Dürer’s rhinoceros as symbol of a mythical animal. The main difference, however, is that the rhinoceros of Dürer is Asian, while mine is African.

D. Would you define yourself as an heir of the tradition of mural painting?

Not at all. Unlike muralists, I do not consider the wall as a blank canvas, and I never manage to forget the reality of the wall in relation to its material supporting role. Instead, I rather feel pretty much to be the heir of the painters who worked in churches, as they had no choice but to integrate the architecture in the composition of their painting.

Q. 'The Hunt' is a fight without any violence and blood, but rather an ironical and surreal hunt. How important is humour in your work?

A. In fact, my purpose was, first of all, to show the absurd agitation before the hunting scene, rather than the hunt itself, and therefore the final outcome of the story remains open. Irony and humour, in general, are omnipresent in my work, because they are a way for me to display, in figurative terms, the uselessness of action.

Q. Who is the clumsy hunter of your hunt?

A. There are several ones. My hunters reveal something animal-like, for they do not seem to master the technique of hunting and let themselves to be guided by their instinct. Rather than the hunters, they are predators. All of them are characterized by some form of ineptness. They are noisy, fearful, hyperactive, lazy, etc ...

Q. The hunter looks like a mime taking action on a theatre scene. Is there any link between your art and theatre?

A. Yes, indeed, there is. I come from improvisational theatre and it has always remained a practice guiding my work. I draw from pictures, and then the work on bodies and the physical language are very important for me.

Q. The gestures of the hunter can also be seen as a still-image of a film sequence. Is there any link with cinema?

There may also be a link with cinema, since before devoting myself to design I worked for many years with video installations. Moreover, silent cinema is for me a real source of inspiration and comedians like Buster Keaton are models.

Q. If every work of art is by nature perishable, yours is even precarious. A year from now, nothing more may have remained; in a day, it might be spoiled by anybody. Does the precarious nature of your work fit with the modern man’s life precariousness?

A. First of all, I consider my works as events, more than timeless and unchanging art pieces. There is certainly a poetic of ephemeral, which is no doubt generated by this kind of practice, and which clearly refers to the human condition, but also to the speed and the perishability of our modern societies.