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 frame, the photographs become precious objects that uniquely combine old and new in a material way.
