Stéphane Couturier – Eileen Gray / Le Corbusier [E-1027+123]

Renowned for his frontal photographs of architecture and his Melting series, which combine multiple views of Toyota factories, or of iconic buildings in Chandigarh, Algiers or Brasilia, Stéphane Couturier explores the notion of a synthesis of the arts in this new series by associating the two figures who left their mark on the villa E-1027: Eileen Gray and Le Corbusier.

It was in 1926 that the Irish designer Gray and architect Jean Badovici conceived of this project as an architectural manifesto. The villa was named E-1027 after a code that combined their names (E for Eileen, 10 for Jean's J, the tenth letter of the alphabet, 2 for Badovici's B, 7 for Gray's G).

Ten years after its completion, the remarkable history of the site began to unfold. In 1938 and 1939, Le Corbusier boldly took over the walls: "I also have a furious desire to dirty the walls: ten compositions are ready, enough to smear everything."
An addition repudiated by Gray, who would never return to the villa.

Today, thanks to photography, Stéphane Couturier merges epochs, giving pride of place to the play of transparencies, the telescoping of architecture with the natural world, the frescoes of Le Corbusier with the details of furniture designed by Gray.

The duality that arises makes it possible to complexify the layers of reality, to express this new realization of the world and of things: movement, instability, the ephemeral, between document and fiction.

The Villa Eileen Gray evolves into osmosis: E-1027+123 (12 for the L of Le and 3 for the C of Corbusier).

Through the merging of a photograph of Gray's architecture with one of Le Corbusier's murals in the villa, we are invited to a kind of "reconciliation of the arts".