All his life, Martial Cherrier has sculpted his own body. French national bodybuilding champion, winner of the Los Angeles competition, he has effortlessly gone through all the stages of an extraordinary metamorphosis. After analysing the nutritional and chemical components involved in this transformation (Food or Drugs, 2000-2003), then revealing the stigmata imprinted on a bodybuilder’s body (État d’urgence, 2012-2013), he is now questioning the images that have structured his imagination and shaped his desires.
Introducing his image into images from the bodybuilding magazines and brochures that moulded his youth as well as into the art books he grew up with, his new photographic self-portraits chart his evolution. Created not with Photoshop but with paper and glue, these collages reveal the subconscious thoughts beneath a forever unrealized dream. “BODY ERGO SUM: I tone, I sculpt, I live my body, therefore I am.” Not unlike the Nietzschean superman, Martial Cherrier invents a world inspired by the imperious desire to incarnate a glorious and deified body.
Faithful to the question of body aesthetics, searching for a kind of mature beauty, Martial Cherrier seems to be saying: “Here’s what I was, here’s what I am.” The images he offers up in “Body ergo sum” are the result of intense negotiation between the image he is constantly working on; the one he agrees to lose, more and more with the years he takes on. In his collages, Martial Cherrier appropriates art from the past: he literally penetrates the artworks of others, inserting his own image into them not without irony. Living in a work by Goya or Rubens, in Rodin’s studio? Martial Cherrier dares, with as much pleasure as self-deprecation. He seems to be saying: “Here’s what I dream to be, here’s where I dream to be. Ecce homo, in an art world that I will not survive, but that I would have liked to.” As Jean-Marc Lachaud[1] wrote about collage: “Collages and montages blend concrete reality with the fantastic, the here with the elsewhere, the non-contemporary with the current, the identifiable with the bizarre. They trace and untrace the contours of territories unknown and unsearched. They build ephemeral passages in which figures of the unknown are yet to be decrypted. They disorient, disrupt, destabilize and provoke.”
Does the body exist without its image? Is body image distinct from the body itself? Martial Cherrier explores in turn these Foucauldian questions and the links he has forged between the body’s perfection – or imperfection – and its image, at the same time constructing his own identity. From the bodybuilder he was (and still is), Cherrier has become an “image builder.”
Barbara Polla & Jean-Luc Monterosso
Barbara Polla is a Swiss exhibition curator and gallery owner who lives and works in Geneva. Jean-Luc Monterosso is the director of Maison Européenne de la Photographie, in Paris.
Martial Cherrier, Body Ergo Sum
From 20th April to 18th June 2017
Maison Européenne de la Photographie
5/7 rue de Fourcy
75004 Paris
France
[1] See Jean-Marc Lachaud, De l’usage du collage en art au XXe siècle, cultures-esthétiques – 8 – 2000.
