LEVALET

LEVALET charles Leval was born in 1988 in Epinal (Lorraine).

He grew up in Guadeloupe before returning to Montreal at the age of 17. He began painting on the island at the age of 13, from one wall to another, but it was upon his return that he studied art at the Fine Arts in Strasbourg.

Theatre, audiovisual, photography, sculpture and painting attract and inspire him just as much but it is towards the plastic arts that he decides to orient himself and passes aggregation. From ink from China, applied on Kraft paper, he develops a series of characters that he will paste and stage on the walls of Paris. Between poetry and parody, his portraits hold their own aesthetics. Always animated by living performing arts, theatre, mime, cinema, Levalet will draw on their graphic codes and references to re-exploit them in the plastic arts. He will form a company of fictional actors on the street who will give the replica to passers-by by their gestures or the stories they evoke.

Not so imaginary as this, Levalet's hyperrealist heroes come to life from photographs of relatives or even self-portraits of the artist. They are reproduced on scale collages, which contributes to the sense of trompe l'oeil desired by the street artist. In this way Levalet's figures can interact with their audiences as with their context. A dialogue that takes place on three levels: drawing, architecture and walker.

The freedom offered by the Paris capital, both in terms of urban furniture and in terms of its policy, the city hall of Paris tries to enhance the young artists who practice graffiti and other urban arts in the 13th arrondissement, constantly frees its creativity. His paper beings have a very pronounced body language and train us without difficulty in their artistic adventures. Each time, they find themselves in absurd and funny scenes that mock our daily lives as much as they dare. By illusion, Levalet makes us slip into a fictitious reality, a reality that seduces us.