La Guerre du Chocolat – Claude Lévêque.

9 February – 5 May 2007
Kültur Büro Barcelona presents La Guerre du Chocolat, a new installation by Claude Lévêque.

In this place of condensation of constraints and opposites, Claude Lévêque questions the celebration of objects and events, the staging of the impalpable (nothing is demonstrative in the spectacular), the autobiography and the durability of memory. It evokes the primary and the repulsion to pay tribute to those who have passed and to the nights when “we will sing in memory of passions that have now disappeared”.

Timothée Chaillou, 2006

Claude Lévêque, born in Nevers in 1953, is one of the most recognized French artists of his generation. He started working in the 80’s inspired by the spirit of punk and new wave culture. He privileges the use of light and sound to create atmospheres more than objects. The artist is particularly interested in the spaces in which these atmospheres are staged. He likes to invest places with particular architectures, such as old industrial buildings and places whose atmosphere evokes abandonment. Claude Lévêque focuses on “the relational aspects and vibrations of a place”. The artist’s imagination constructs, from the particularities of the site, a scenario that will be translated by light, sound and simple objects, the raw materials of his work.

For “La Guerre du Chocolat”, Claude Lévêque uses a dark blue ambient light that is absorbed by the walls and ceiling of the room painted black. Two old wooden chariots and a disproportionate barrier formed by sharpened electric poles, whose tips graze the ceiling, are arranged in the space. The poles are connected to each other by cables on which thin white light bulbs float, but the joyful event that could turn the cables into garlands is missing. The white lights here do not evoke the idea of a meeting or a party, as would be the case with Christmas lights or those of a popular ball, but rather suggest a trace of isolated life in a faraway night.

The wooden posts and carts are covered with melted chocolate. Paradoxical elements of the installation, the lights and the chocolate on one side, and the darkness and old wood on the other, cause significant confusion. The primitive sensibility of the “visitor” of this night or the “spectator” of this staging is its only weapon here.