Stéphane Couturier
Stéphane Couturier has been exhibiting different photographic series since 1994: the first one, Archéologie urbaine, is focused on urban spaces undergoing transformation. Next came Villes génériques, Landscaping and lastly Melting Point, inaugurated with work on the Toyota factories in 2005. The city, industry, built landscapes are, for Stéphane Couturier, a way of questioning the relationship of the work and the subject represented. This dual aspect - the documentary investigation of the inseparable from the plastic research - characterises all his photographic work. Thus, through the approaches that Stéphane Courturier proposes, the photographic subject seems to be perceived as a living organism, in perpetual evolution made up of successive layers. The accumulation of materials and colours, the remarkable frontality of the compositions makes it possible to dramatise the site that he photographs. Planes are crushed, the whole is treated in flat areas, in this way eliminating any architectural perspective. In Melting Point, the idea is to make the documentary aspect of the photo drift, to go beyond its narrative dimension, while keeping the documentary elements that compose it intact: reality is no longer made up of isolated things, with fixed geometric forms, but becomes a reality of flow, in continuous motion and transformation. In 2006, Stéphane Couturier exhibited the series Chandigarh replay, in which Le Corbusier's architecture is merged with his plastic work. He has continued to visit major metropolises (Brasilia, Havana, Barcelona), before offering today new developments in the plays between opacity and transparency, in heightening the intimately entwined dimension of the Festival d'Avignon and the architecture of the Cité des papes.
May 2011.