Li Chevalier, trajectory of desire : all the roads lead to...

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Le chevalier

Trajectory of desire

Li Chevalier's work possesses the magic of landscapes of silence and meditation and makes the rift, dear to François Jullien, which unites cultures rather than dividing them, appears before our eyes and leads us beyond our obsolete principles of cultural identity. Her aesthetics of beauty questions this universal dialogue about what brings us together. It maps out a pictorial and philosophical path that leads us from a geography of mystery to an in-depth reflection on our thinking habits, far from any kind of artistic hegemony, as defined by Nicolas Bourriaud, when he speaks of alter-modernity.

Thus, she opens up an infinite space, made of contemplation, emptiness and fullness, subjective correlations between the great Chinese tradition and the confines of the West.

Her singular art is to be explored in fragments forming a fertile soil, drawn in ink and borne by music, poetry and philosophy, leading us from the similar to the common.

Her fertile language intertwines hitherto unknown relationships between man and nature - the divine - and allows a new « possible », the « known yet unknown » Hegel speaks of, to take form.

If art were to serve only one purpose, would it not be that of obliging us to put our reason to the test and to deploy new resources for thought ? Li Chevalier's canvases, both beautiful and contemporary, figurative and abstract, of yesterday and of today, have that power. « Thus, we can only enter step by step into the beyond that transfigures us. With an open eye and a beating heart », says François Cheng.

This major monograph of Li Chevalier's work was prefaced by Luc Ferry and commented upon by Gérard Xuriguera, Raphaël Enthoven, Emmanuel Lincot, François Jullien, Geneviève Galley and Daniel Bougnoux. Each in his or her own manner, these philosophers and art critics retrace an exceptional career, between China and France, and draw, with the artist, Trajectory of Desire, at once hymns to the beauty of the world and odes to nature and to art.