Deprived of their focal point, the images are made strange and induce a sense of oneiric unease. The objects of sexual desire are hidden the rugby ball and kit are missing. Both series radiate a clinical coldness, with their blank backgrounds, inexpressive faces, geometric positionings, bland clothing and furniture as with all of Levé’s work, they focus on absence. ‘Rugby’ has casually dressed men acting out a rugby match – in scrums, being tackled, reaching for a non-existent ball. In the former – which was also a performance piece at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris – Levé posed fully-clothed men and women in stereotypical pornographic scenarios. Levé’s engagement with visual conventions culminates in the series ‘Pornographie’ (2002) and ‘Rugby’ (2003). A similar sense of disquiet emanates from the series ‘Angoisse’ (Anguish, 2001), in which the village of Angoisse in southwest France appears eerily depopulated. Levé’s sitters assumed mortuary-like poses and impassive expressions for his portraits with hindsight one can’t help reading them as autobiographical. With their desolate streetscapes, huge, empty skies, cemeteries and war memorials, there is something deeply troubling about these images.
He criss-crossed the US for his series ‘Amérique’ (America) in 2004, photographing heartland towns named after great world cities (such as Rio, Baghdad, Berlin). In his few short years of activity, Levé kept up a dizzying rate of production, completing a dozen major photographic series and four literary works. Deprived of their focal point, the images induce a sense of oneiric unease. In voiding the images of any specificity, Levé reduces them to uncanny archetypes, suspended outside time and place. His next book, Journal (2004), a collection of newspaper items with identifying references stripped out (‘A government has resigned and an outgoing minister has formed a new cabinet.’), perfectly complements his series ‘Actualités’ ( Current Events, 2003), in which press photos of speeches, opening ceremonies etc., are reconstituted with anonymous models. A book describes the works the author has thought of, but never produced.’ Some of these ideas were later brought to fruition, reflecting the way Levé’s photographic and literary work bled into each other, ultimately to form a whole. His first publication, Oeuvres (2002), is an imaginary catalogue raisonné of 533 conceptual projects, self-defined in its first entry: ‘1.
Although the series lacks the visual éclat of his later works, Levé’s key themes are already in place: the notion of the double the ‘fiction of identity’ (as he once put it in an interview) the fascination for generic codes of representation.Īt the same time, Levé began to write under the influence of authors including Georges Perec and Raymond Roussel (another suicide). For his first project, ‘Homonyms’ (1996–9), Levé scoured the phone directory for people who shared their name with figures he admired (such as Yves Klein, André Breton and Georges Bataille), and then asked to photograph them. Soon after, he reinvented himself as a conceptual photographer. Over the next few years he painted abstract canvases in his Paris atelier, but burned most of them on returning from a long trip to India. A business school graduate, he briefly worked in the corporate world before switching to art in 1991. Levé grew up in the wealthy Paris suburb of Neuilly. At the age of 42, he had merged life and art in a most brutal and complex manner. Shortly after completing the manuscript in late 2007, Levé hanged himself in his Paris apartment, leaving behind a letter in which he expressed the wish that his last work be published. Isn’t it strange how your final act has inverted your biography?’ These lines are from the novel Suicide (2008) by French artist and author Édouard Levé. ‘Whenever people talk about you, they start with your death, then go back in time to explain it. Courtesy: galerie Loevenbruck, Paris, and the artist.
Édouard Levé, Serie Angoisse, Sortie d'Angoisse, 2010.
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