E1027+123 – Villa Eileen Gray
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.'