Gérard Chauvin (France)

Gérard Chauvin
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Gérard Chauvin is a multimedia artist who works on the crucial questions of identity, difference and the social questions linked to these differences. The freedom to be able to dispose of one’s own body and therefore make the choice of its orientation and its sexual identity are very present in his works.
The works are very often participative and invite the people to come and testify as the public to integrate into their work.
These societal intentions run through a large part of his proposals, making the connection between the work and a social and political aspect. Then arise works that embody concepts that can be likened to a manifesto intended to acquire, if not to preserve our freedoms.

Another aspect of his work evokes the change in our relational and sexual behaviors in the web sphere, the works then take a particular look at this paradise of the Net which is necessarily without body. (CF David Le Breton, L’Adieu au corps, Paris, Métailié, 2000.)
Indeed, one of the most remarkable and disturbing proposition is without question, this way that we sometimes have to exchange using the avatars and the changes of identity that the Net offers us. These constructions of personalities use symbolic and fantastical forms which put the tangible body at a distance. No judgment is then made and Gérard Chauvin brings into play poetic and artistic incarnations which are content to bring a particular light in the form of observation and analysis.

Participant in
VideoChannel – [self]~imaging (2010)
The Wake Up Memorial – Corona! Shut Down?, 2020
WALK WITH MY SHADOWS, 2020, 3:19
A poetic-symptomatic extrapolation in the context of Covid19,
According to the allegory of the Cave (Plato)
Forced isolation can sometimes generate ready-made opinions,

Here the passage of time of confinement
is punctuated by the metronome of daily walking outdoors.
What we experience “inside” must not obscure what is happening “outside”.
This should then awaken us to what we need to learn from the world around us.

Reading extracts from Book 7 of the Republic.
@ Gérard Chauvin April 2020