It was under the dual seal of rebirth that Wahib Chehata began his career as an artist. Having worked in various roles related to art direction and honed his eye in the publishing and production sectors, he took the plunge in the early 2010s with a very clear vision of what his work should be. Drawing inspiration from Renaissance painting, he sought to create new works that were more than mere images. What Renaissance artists and architects proposed at the turn of the 15th century, through the use of perspective and the reappropriation of classical subjects, was a re-examination of humanity’s place within the prevailing conception of the world. The humanist thinking that permeated all fields at that time is embodied in particular in questions of measurement. From astronomy to medicine, new methods were being experimented with, whether it was dissecting bodies or searching the cosmos for answers. For the artist, the parallel with the contemporary world justifies the use of cutting-edge techniques across projects, in the service of a coherent project that now takes the form of anthropometry.

Throughout the ages and across cultures, the act of measuring the human form has taken on various meanings; it could involve seeking something divine in its proportions—a mathematical perfection—just as it could involve finding signs of vice or criminality. From Vitruvian Man, drawn for Luca Pacioli’s The Divine Proportion, to the physiognomy championed by Cesare Lombroso, via the forensic identification method developed by Alphonse Bertillon, this research has, of course, influenced the ways in which the body is perceived. For Wahib Chehata, it is less a matter of defining the body of a particular individual than of considering the social body and, ultimately, the body of a crowd. These various shifts have occurred gradually and are better understood by examining the way in which the artist works on his images, composing them from a digital space. Although the artist initially worked with photography, he has always likened his work to that of a painter, limiting his prints to a single copy and claiming above all a cosa mentale, that is to say, in the words of Leonardo da Vinci, a work of the mind.

By incorporating new tools as they are developed, he has worked with everything from image-editing and 3D modelling software to today’s artificial intelligence.

It is possible to project many things onto the faces presented by Wahib Chehata. The artist has created his portraits virtually, assembling features to hold up a screen, as it were, to those who wish to identify with them.

Rendered almost inaccessible beneath a profusion of symbols and ornamentation, primarily associated with religions (Catholic or Islamic), the figures refer solely to cultural avatars. Whilst they may well be associated with saints, martyrs, or images that are either desirable or repulsive, they function as a reaction to society. Wahib Chehata thus brings together two series of images in his new body of work: on the one hand, individuals depicted as characters, with their own particular stories and distinct personalities; and on the other, crowds depicted in motion within large polyptychs that evoke certain historical or mythological episodes which we cannot quite identify, even though they seem familiar, archetypal.

Peter Greenaway, having moved from cinema to the exhibition space, sought through his video series Obedience to convey the biblical story of Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael by stripping the characterisation down to its bare essentials.

Wahib Chehata, fascinated by the narrative possibilities of the image, follows the same path; he creates icons and develops imagery that transcends everyday violence and, in a sense, sanctifies it. In place of the anonymous crowds captured by the press with their various captions, the artist presents an absolute, anonymous and irrevocable uprising. Wahib Chehata explores the tension between the individual and the collective, the contradiction between personal aspirations and social norms. In the series “Tes désirs sont désordre”, he seeks to depict a social body gripped by contradictory desires, a violent dissociation resulting in characters in the throes of implosion. Wahib Chehata does not deny a quest for the spectacular, in the sense that, as Debord demonstrated, it is impossible to escape it, but this quest is by no means gratuitous; it accompanies the search for meaning. The bullet marks in a marble base, sometimes on gold-leafed panels, elevate the stigma to a precious relic, reframing violence in the tradition of the Catholic faith or Andy Warhol. The almost lyrical outpourings of his crowds convey a profound aspiration that is entirely immaterial. The artist’s digital work thus points to a deeper, almost metaphysical aspiration; as if simulating the gravity of a body, or the effect of an action and its reaction, enabled us to identify certain universal laws. The body, the artist asserts, is the centre of everything; and virtually speaking, the aim is to set it in motion to understand just how far it can go.