The series of large-format photographs produced by Stéphane Couturier for the Festival d'Avignon associates two temporal spaces, two distinct moments in the life of the Cour d'honneur du the Palais des papes, the Cloître des Carmes and the Cour du Lycée Saint-Joseph: their ordinary winter season and that of their summer, theatre season. Armed with his view camera and a solid point of view on the venues, the artist took images that show the edifices sometimes with a certain bareness of walls and floors, sometimes in their stage costumes, with actors and spectators. Next he did what he calls a "merging" between the two images, through compositions whose tendency towards abstraction is tempered by the possible identification of details. In the series Avignon, he has innovated in several ways on his "merger points": by associating day and night, by multiplying the presence of humans, by combining digital and argentic photographs. He has finally created a frame in the form of a checkerboard, which encompasses the entire work and in a certain way evokes another theatre "stage," provided with trap doors specific to trapping the viewer's gaze. Drawn from the best documentary sources, the reworked images suggest, in the end, a fictional itinerary on three flagship venues of Avignon, which puts into action a theatre of the view, of which the spectator can become the director. JLP
Production
Commissioned by the Ministry of Culture and Communication, the Centre national des Arts plastiques and the Festival d'Avignon