«This photographic work would like to echo the search for a synthesis of the arts between the forms of painting and architecture, as dreamed of by the artistic world of the 1930s.
According to Fernand Léger, «It is a three-way agreement that must be found: between the wall, the architect and the painter.
By merging a photograph of Eileen Gray’s architecture with one of the murals that Le Corbusier painted in the villa, we are witnessing a kind of «reconciliation of the arts».
For the past fifteen years, under the name «Melting Point», Stéphane Couturier (FR 1957) has been superimposing two photographic records to propose a hybrid image, both fluid and dynamic, while keeping intact the documentary root of the starting elements. Stéphane Couturier’s works have a liberating quality, changing the view to finally access a more acute degree of reality through its questioning.
Many cities have flourished beneath the lens of Stéphane Couturier. In recent years, he has photographed the façades and architecture of Algiers, Barcelona, Brasília, or Salvador da Bahia. For this new project, the artist finally crosses the thresholds of houses and focuses on what occurs behind shutters and parapets. He photographs the flipside of the walls: the side that harbours and no longer that which exhibits. This shift from exterior to interior is inevitably accompanied by a dive into intimacy. In terms of architecture, it would appear that domestic and psychological interiors sometimes merge. At least, this is the analogy conceptualised by Eileen Gray, the architect and former owner of the building Stéphane Couturier chose to photograph: Villa E-1027. Built in 1929 at Roquebrune Cap-Martin in the Alpes-Maritimes, this home was her ultimate architectural work. While at the time, modernists were devising the “machine to inhabit”, Eileen Gray was imagining space as an expansion of the self. For her, the home is “the shell of man, his extension, expansion, and spiritual radiance.” *
But Gray’s voice is not the only one to resonate in the images of Stéphane Couturier, because several years after the architect’s departure, Le Corbusier drew six huge frescoes on the walls of her Villa. To the extent that even now, these colours occupy every wall, devouring the partitions and arresting our retina. These brushstrokes are like so many replicas that crop up in Stéphane Couturier’s photographs. Although far from the hubbub of the major capitals, there are therefore still voices that emerge from his artworks. The latter do not allow us to guess the stories that these places have accommodated, but do provide a glimpse of a conversation that only the Mediterranean swells come to cover. Because while they are stripped of any human presence, Stéphane Couturier’s photographs are never inert blocks, but quite the contrary, since the artist observes buildings as though they were living organisms. So much so that the humidity of cities, the noise of the throng, and the fervour of the sun’s rays emanate from his shots. Here, the exchange between Gray and Le Corbusier’s works incites the fever to grip us.
Until now, Stéphane Couturier had always constrained our eyes to read his photographs from left to right or top to bottom. By abolishing perspectives, the artist has prevented any possibility of escape. These new interminglings lead us through layers of time, to a period in which the arts were still debated. They guide the considerations of the 1930s towards us, such as those of Fernand Leger, who pleaded at the time in favour of a “three-way complicity” between the wall, the architect, and the painter. Stéphane Couturier’s combinative games are moderators. His layers and superpositions become the agents of photography’s liberation. Henceforth, photography will be free of reality.
Camille Bardin – November 2022
*“De l’éclectisme au doute”, conversation between Jean Badovici and Eileen Gray in the magazine L’Architecture vivante, Autumn–Winter 1929.
