Claude Monet would have been fascinated by the sea of flowers at Munich's Kunsthalle, where visitors are immersed in virtual blooms and leaves. His famous water lilies do nothing different, though perhaps more quietly and less wildly in form and color. This is precisely what the great Impressionist envisioned more than 100 years ago: complete immersion in painting, a horizon-free all-around experience that was only realized after his death in 1926 at the Orangerie behind the Paris Louvre.
The highlight there consists of meter-long pond views around an oval hall. This is the enhancement that Miguel Chevalier embraces to bow before one of his heroes. And this comes from a pioneer of digital art who, in 2023, incorporated artificial intelligence for the first time. The 66-year-old Frenchman often draws his inspiration from nature, overturning the usual clichés about digital art.
In the first room, structures develop on the walls that shift with even the slightest movement from the audience, becoming perforated like fishnet stockings or collapsing into themselves, only to form new formations the next moment. "The Origin of the World," the title of this interactive installation, doesn't come by chance. When viewing Gustave Courbet's scandalous painting of the same name objectively, one or two cells and their division stand at the beginning of an organism.
Without much imagination, one can read such concepts from Chevalier's image flows. Moving into the micro realm, we encounter pixels. They are just as invisible as the cells of living beings, yet equally fundamental. As banal as this may sound, chance plays the decisive role, just as in evolution. Which of the 70 patterns of this "Origin of the World" comes into play is determined by chance, driven by incredibly complex algorithms.
Chevalier allows himself this playful approach quite literally. For laypeople, these are completely impenetrable blueprints, yet mastermind Miguel himself started from zero. Computers existed, but in the early 1980s, they were still reserved for scientists. An engineer provided the art and archaeology student access to the national research center, where Chevalier could develop his first image processing codes in the programming language Fortran between midnight and six in the morning.
A scholarship in New York then brought the opportunity to use graphics cards and rudimentary drawing software. Today, this is hard to imagine – even the most basic notebook offers multiples of what Chevalier had dreamed of in his wildest fantasies. His Commodore Amiga 1000 from 1985 appears in the exhibition like a bulky fossil from ancient times.
Anyone fearing that Chevalier's first comprehensive solo appearance in the German-speaking world is aimed primarily at fans of bits and bytes will experience a colorful wonder. Sensual experience has priority for him; he is thoroughly an artist with the urge to reach the broadest possible public. Even as a small boy, Miguel visited museums and palacios in Mexico with his father – director of French cultural institutes in Latin America in the sixties – literally devouring Diego Rivera's sprawling murals. They continue to shape this tinkerer today, especially since the Kunsthalle with its generous spaces offers ideal conditions for his installations.
This applies not only to the moving installations, some accompanied by Jacopo Baboni Schiling's compositions, which often react to their counterpart – even by reproducing a "selfie" in geometric patterns that resembles a mosaic. Chevalier also relies on three-dimensional work and the physical experience of so-called voxels in space. A Janus head built from fire-red Lego-like blocks, emerging from a 3D printer, stands for past and future while symbolizing this entire œuvre.
Such objects still exude a tinkerer's charm, like the oversized grid spheres hanging from the ceiling. Fluorescent steel rods are scattered crisscross like pickup sticks, forming a dense network under the meaningful title "Rhizomatic," alluding to the underground root networks – rhizomes – of plants like ginger or the barely tamable ground elder.
As the exhibition progresses, digital nature increasingly gains the upper hand. Particularly appealing are the resin flowers from the 3D printer that accompany a digital herbarium. Then there are folded sculptures growing from the ground, reminiscent of Finnish designer Alvar Aalto's glass vases. This species has also emerged from the fabricator, with much coming so close to real nature that one can feel quite dizzy between jellyfish formations and virus spheres.
In a certain sense, all of this already exists. Nothing more can be added to creation, as demonstrated by a glance at the beautiful references from botanical and mineralogical collections. "I am a digital impressionist," the artist declares. When considering how Monet and the entire guild brought what was barely perceptible to the eye onto canvas, one can only underscore this confession. What Chevalier weaves from this is nevertheless excitingly different and new, all a matter of perspective and dimensions.
The exhibition "Digital by Nature: Miguel Chevalier" runs until March 1 at Munich's Kunsthalle, open daily from 10 AM to 8 PM. The catalog, published by Hirmer with 176 pages, costs 25 euros at the exhibition and 39.90 euros in retail.
