Yvaral’s Muse

In 1963, Yvaral met Michèle at the opening of one of his father’s exhibitions at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. He married a few years later, after a brief first marriage. Michèle was a slander blonde beauty, typical of the Twiggy model aesthetic canons of the time. “I had beautiful thick hair, longer than the skirt, a child’s body, ultra-flat, and big eyes with lots of make-up,” she described herself in her memoirs. Numerous photographs taken by Yvaral himself at the time reflect this appearance, which inspired the artist when, in 1977, he returned to figuration and produced his first digitalized images.
 

Until 1979, Michèle was the subject of an initial body of work that is undoubtedly the most significant in the digitization family. Yet they derive from just three motifs: one is a portrait, the other two are frontal nudes. But these matrix images are declined in multiple variants that play on the modulus of the pixelated structure and its chromaticism, provoking visual situations reminiscent of those of optical and kinetic art. Yvaral returned to Michèle’s image in 1992, with a number of new poses, and at a time when his iconography had been enriched by other representations of female nudes. He brought them together in a series whose double-entendre title, Corps corpusculaires, connects eroticism with science, which fascinated the artist as much as it had his father. 
 

Transferred to canvas, Michèle’s glamorous image gives Yvaral’s digitizations an undeniably pop character. It gives them a singular position in the landscape of art history: between op, pop and digital art.

Arnauld Pierre