Digital City

Chevalier is a pioneer of digital art who has experimented with computer-generated images since 1978. His visual compositions and immersive environments explore the relationship between virtual and physical worlds, creating parallels between the geometric grids of architectural structures, city plans, and computers and digital technologies. Chevalier describes himself as continuing an avant-garde tradition that has long been influenced by scientific discoveries, notably in the work of French Impressionist painters such as Georges Seurat and Claude Monet. In Digital City, an urban skyline is overlaid by a digitally generated grid of white lines that radiate downwards from the top of the image. The vibrant, contrasting colors describe a psychedelic landscape in which sunlight metamorphoses into the laser projections of a music venue or nightclub. The sensorial quality of light as a metaphor for a unifying physical presence is a recurrent idea in Chevalier’s work.

Text credit: Produced in collaboration with the University of Maryland Department of Art History & Archaeology and Patricia Ortega-Miranda