Oeuvre 220 : Édouard Levé according to Nicolas Brasseur. Interview with Olivier Sécardin

Abstract

Nicolas Brasseur, artist and photographer, born in 1981 in Nantes. Lives and works in Paris. A 2008 graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, Nicolas Brasseur pursues documentary work within French institutions around the concept of “model images”. His research has led him to photograph hospitals, schools, and more recently prisons, in partnership with the Centre Photographique d'Ile-de-France (CPIF).

Édouard Levé, writer, artist, photographer, born in 1965, died in 2007. A graduate of ESSEC Business School, he began painting in 1991, then burned almost all of his canvases before devoting himself to photography. In 1999, he produced his first series, Homonymes, which featured photographic portraits of unknown people with famous names: Georges Bataille, Yves Klein, Henri Michaux, etc. He used the same process in Amérique (2006), a reportage on American cities that bear the names of other well-known cities: Florence, Berlin, Paris, etc. He is the author of several photographic series. An admirer of Raymond Roussel and a reader of Jacques Roubaud and Raymond Queneau, Édouard Levé is also a writer. OEuvres, published in 2002, is a catalogue of 533 imagined art projects, installations, paintings, sculptures and photographs that the artist ‘conceived but never realised’. His Autoportrait presents him in ‘1,600 sentences without interruption’. Three days before taking his own life, Édouard Levé submitted the manuscript of his last text, Suicide (2008), to his publisher.