Stéphane Couturier

Usine Toyota n°5 (Valenciennes) – Stéphane Couturier, Toyota, Car Factory, Art

2005

Stéphane COUTURIER (*1957, France) Usine Toyota n°9 (Valenciennes), 2005 Sheet 182 x 241 cm (71 5/8 x 94 7/8 in.) Frame 189 x 241 cm (74 3/8 x 97 5/8 in.) Edition of 5; Ed. no. 3/5 Framed Born in 1957 in Neuilly sur Seine, Stéphane Couturier currently lives and works in Paris. In 1994, Stéphane Couturier showed his first works in a series called 'Urban Archaeology', viewing the city as a living organism with multiple aspects. He photographed it deliberately avoiding anything that suggested poetry, nostalgia or strangeness. From 1999 on, Stéphane Couturier was increasingly drawn to suburbs and began to focus on a different type of landscape: on the one hand, by tackling housing blocks and high-rises in his 'Monuments' series; on the other, by photographing mushrooming housing developments.These generic cities soon became his favorite subject. In 2002, the uniformity and repetitiveness of these landscapes around the world drove him to begin working on the concept of the polyptych: the combinations and interchangeability of each of the elements in a polyptych give rise to a play with 'Landscaping' (the title of a new series), with the spectator recomposing a landscape between reality and fiction. WStéphane Couturier series ‘Melting Point’ presents a Toyota assembly plant in Valenciennes (France). Emphasizing the cycles of construction and demolition endemic to modern industrialized life, the photographs possess dynamic vertical and horizontal lines, elegant curves, and brilliant effects of light and indigenous colour. Using a large-format camera, Couturier creates crisply detailed prints that expand the viewer’s awareness of how a photograph can look and how urban occurrences can be conceptualized. Each picture is printed from a sandwiching of two moments in time, creating highly abstract yet precisely detailed images. People, machines, car parts, wires and more all compete for the viewer’s attention—images of industry simultaneously out of control and in perfect harmony. – Art, Contemporary, Colour, Architecture, Photography, Geometry, Graphics, Structured, Pattern, Car Factory...

Stéphane COUTURIER (*1957, France) Les Nouveaux Constructeurs, Sète – Port n°3, 2018 Cibachrome, framed to artist's specification 69 x 52 cm (27 1/8 x 20 1/2 in.) Edition of 4; Ed. no. 2/4 Framed Born in 1957 in Neuilly sur Seine, Stéphane Couturier currently lives and works in Paris. In 1994, Stéphane Couturier showed his first works in a series called 'Urban Archaeology', viewing the city as a living organism with multiple aspects. He photographed it deliberately avoiding anything that suggested poetry, nostalgia or strangeness. From 1999 on, Stéphane Couturier was increasingly drawn to suburbs and began to focus on a different type of landscape: on the one hand, by tackling housing blocks and high-rises in his 'Monuments' series; on the other, by photographing mushrooming housing developments.These generic cities soon became his favorite subject. – Les Nouveaux Constructeurs At the invitation of Julie Gutierrez, curator of the Musée Fernand Léger in Biot (France), Stéphane Couturier intensively studied the work of Fernand Léger, one of the Master of Modern painting in France in the early 20th century. Léger paid particular attention to the upheavals of his time. Alongside the city, the transformation of man through machine and mass production was the central theme of his works, which, starting from the formal experiments of the Cubists, found their own artistic expression, combining Cubist avant-garde with Communist commitment. ‘I have become aware of the many elements that bring me closer to him - his fascination for the city, for industrial elements, for architecture, for the geometry of forms...’, comments Stéphane Couturier on his examination of Léger's work. When photographs of cityscapes and industrial architecture are combined with the painter's compositions, the principle of superimposing two images, which the photographer has developed into an essential element of his art in recent years, is taken to a new level. The encounter of two different and yet closely related, because architectural structures, leads to works that are both painterly photographs and photographic paintings. Constructively and constructively, these works depict the reality as seen, yet go beyond the merely visible. Not images, but pictures that have their own reality. Photographed as cibachromes and fitted into a black object...

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