I still remember the architect Luis Barragán, who had worked out an architectural manifesto on the basis of his own house, which our family had visited. His buildings and his violent use of color left a lasting mark on me. Octavio Paz, André Malraux, Fernand Braudel, and Paul Rivet, as well as numerous other personalities in the world of letters, often were passing through Mexico. They certainly contributed to my artistic awakening. As a child, I was unaware of this cultural ferment; it was only later that I realized that all these relationships my parents had with these people played a major role in my own intellectual awakening and in my creative artistic process.
The landscape in Mexico also made an impression on me. In Mexico, nature is everywhere and lush. My parents and I often went to a small countryside house, 150km away from Mexico City. I was fascinated by the strange plants growing in the garden, especially by the carnivorous plants.
Growing up in an academic household, led by a father who was to reach international acclaim for his pioneering work on agrarian history in colonial Mexico and who would later return to and serve as director of the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid, one might assume Miguel would follow in this academic tradition of intellectual scholarship, teaching, and curatorship.
But Chevalier had other ideas. He wanted to be an artist. The notion initially did not go over well with his father, who saw artist friends struggle to make a living. Fortunately for us, that did not stop Miguel; and in telling the story, he quickly points out his father and mother became his biggest supporters initially and across time. Understanding these origins and this support, it now becomes possible to understand the confidence Chevalier has/had to strike his own path and the drive not only to see it through but to keep learning and growing.
Influences
Chevalier’s path as an artist was not an easy one. As an art student in the late-1970s, studying first at the School of Fine Arts in Paris (ENSBA) and then at the School of Decorative Arts, Miguel did not embrace the Zeitgeist of the time. Painting was in vogue, with Free Figuration and Graffiti Art dominating (think Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring). Computers were massive, sometimes taking up entire buildings, with code entered not on screen but through the use of computer cards. People had not even conceived of the Information Age, let alone the Internet. For a student and artist interested in technology, it would become a long and lonely journey.
That did not deter Chevalier, however, who understood early on that he wanted to focus on the artistic side of technology. His first works followed in the tradition of Norman Maclaren and involved painting on slides and recycled television screens or producing compressed and recolored videos inspired by Nam June Paik.1 It was the first time one could say Miguel was working to develop a form of digital art, one that involved painting on or through computers and glass. Though the work met with resistance, Miguel was pushed forward through the support of “Roger Tallon, a designer close to the New Realists, and Restany, a discoverer of new talents, who exhorted him to pursue his adventurous path.”2
An “ah-ha” Moment
A major breakthrough in Miguel’s career came when he projected computer screenshots on paintings, as décor for the Uzes Festival. Serge Equilbey, an engineer at the Optics Center of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), saw the work and granted Miguel access to CNRS’s Numelec computers. These computers, which could analyze images in several successive processing stages, allowed Miguel to discover, when zooming in on images, the screens of these machines were composed not of points but of pixels.
Why was this so important? According to Jérôme Neutres, Chevalier found his place within and yet difference from artists who had gone before him:
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