Who is Marlène Chevalier?
A graduate of the Beaux-Arts in Lyon and Saint-Etienne, Marlène is a designer. Before devoting herself fully to drawing, Marlène Chevalier worked for 7 years in her toy company, as a product designer. Afterwards, she taught for 6 years in art schools. It was this experience that led her to choose to devote herself fully to drawing.
She then experimented with a particular question: how to transcribe an emotion through an image?
“My work brings together my fascination for patterns and frames with the aim of retranscribing the vibrations of an emotion through an image. I seek to make emotions visible and recognisable, without them being restricted by words […].”
She is essentially interested in language, memory and how to make them exist. Her desire is to materialise the complexity of the feelings that run through us, she speaks of retranscription, memory, translation, trace… She imagines a mode of communication around the repertoire of emotions. Thanks to frames and optical greys, she invents a new lexical field that is more exhaustive, more precise than words, and more instinctive. For Marlène, drawing is a spontaneous way of writing: each image is the seismogram of a moment, a day, a passage. She uses the energy of optical greys and the intensity of dotted lines to make the emotion perceptible.