Stéphane Couturier – Les nouveaux Constructeurs
“Les Nouveaux Constructeurs” will present, for the first time in Germany, photographer Stéphane Couturier’s work that resulted from his involvement with French painter Fernand Léger’s œuvre.
Upon the invitation of Julie Gutierrez, curator of the Fernand Léger Museum in Biot, Stéphane Couturier worked intensely with the oeuvre of Fernand Léger, one of the masters of modern painting in early 20th-century France. Léger was particularly attentive to the radical transitions of his time. The central focus of his work was the changes people and cities went through due to machines and mass production. Drawing from the form experiments of the cubists, his body of work found its particular artistic expression, which merged the cubist avantgarde with communist engagement.
Our exhibition Les Nouveaux Constructeurs will present, for the first time in Germany, photographer Stéphane Couturier’s work that resulted from his involvement with French painter Fernand Léger’s œuvre.
Upon the invitation of Julie Gutierrez, curator of the Fernand Léger Museum in Biot, Stéphane Couturier worked intensely with the oeuvre of Fernand Léger, one of the masters of modern painting in early 20th-century France. Léger was particularly attentive to the radical transitions of his time. The central focus of his work was the changes people and cities went through due to machines and mass production. Drawing from the form experiments of the Cubists, his body of work found its particular artistic expression, merging the cubist avant-garde with communist engagement.
“I became aware of the many elements that brought him closer to me—his fascination with the city, with industrial elements, with architecture, with the geometry of forms…”, comments Stéphane Couturier on his involvement with Léger’s body of work. As images of urban landscapes and industrial architecture are combined with the painter’s compositions, the principle of superimposing two images—an essential element of Couturier’s artistic practice—is raised to a new level.
As two different yet closely related architectural structures meet, works emerge that are simultaneously painterly photographs and photographic paintings. Constructive and constructed, these works depict visual reality while venturing beyond the visible. They are not reproductions, but images with their own reality. Processed as Cibachrome and mounted in black object frames, the photographs become precious objects that unite the old and the new on a material level.
Stéphane Couturier’s engagement with Fernand Léger’s work seems only logical, as his artistic practice has focused on the human-shaped environment since the beginning of his career. His images of construction sites, streets, façades, bridges, and temporary architecture reveal structures that recall abstract painting. Like Henri Cartier-Bresson, who aimed for the human figure in the “moment décisif,” Couturier seeks the moment and the point of view that present the world as colour, form, and composition.
Through the superposition of two photographs as digital double exposures, the austere images of architecture and urban landscapes suddenly become poetic. The two images overlap in a phantasmal way, and a new reality emerges—one that can only be perceived through the apparatus. Couturier’s digital montages go beyond the mere fusion of two images, opening lucid spaces that seem to originate from a realm between dream and reality. They playfully navigate the boundaries between photographic image, the real, and the virtual, thus challenging both the medium and our ways of seeing.
Stéphane Couturier (born 1957) is represented in numerous prominent collections, including the Centre Pompidou, the Musée du Petit Palais, and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Art Institute of Chicago, and LACMA in the United States; as well as the Stiftung Weserburg in Bremen. His solo exhibitions include the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris (2015), the Musée Nicéphore Niépce in Chalon-sur-Saône (2016/17), the Musée de la Photographie in Charleroi (2018), and the Musée Fernand Léger in Biot (2019).
