Michel Couturier

Michel Couturier is fascinated by unlivable places: parking lots, shopping malls, harbour installations. The fundamental intuitive idea behind his work is that these places are like a magnifying mirror of the public space. These places are like ‘forests of signs’ (those of power and alienation), a substituted nature.

To reclaim the contemporary world and turn it into the space of singular experience, we must resist the great authoritarian searchlight of power and be attentive, look for the remnants of counterforces, which, like fireflies in the dark, are only visible when we look for them. The work of Michel Couturier inscribes itself in this dialectic of domination and survival. How should we look at the world? Which point of view should we adopt? That of the baby, spurred by sovereign curiosity, whose gaze devours, feels, manipulates and bites? That of the archaeologist, who tries to read the remains he has just discovered? Or that of the tourist who, later, on a tour package, visits these same ruins?

Michel Couturier describes contemporary landscape through photography, drawing and video. In cities and their peripheries, he is particularly interested in objects such as antennas, billboards, lighting towers, security fences, elements that are both strange and familiar. He transforms them, at times into light, at others into forms. He mostly presents his photographs as large format posters that are sometimes placed in the urban space. In his drawings, he isolates fragments of the suburban landscape; by retaining only their shadows and severing them from their primary function, he transforms them into signs. These almost abstract figures become markers of another understanding of contemporary landscape; new hieroglyphics which we are meant to give meaning.

For Couturier, it is a matter of inhabiting the world that surrounds us and exercising one’s freedom. This principle is particularly imperative in the alienating landscape of motorways, car parks and shopping centers, entirely conditioned by consumption and circulation. There more than elsewhere, one must converse with fences, panels, antennas, and lighting towers that soar skyward.

Michel Couturier currently lives and works in Brussels. He works with photography, videos and drawing in relation to sculpture, architecture and public space. Since 2001, his work questions the city and its surroundings, often in connection with mythology and traces of it in a contemporary landscape. He has shown his work in Brussels, Ghent, Antwerp, Lille, Roubaix, Tourcoing, Marseille, Paris, Geneva, Montréal, Rotterdam, Berlin and Valencia. 

Some of his recent exhibitions in 2014: Galerie du Tableau, Marseille; Espace Été 78, Brussels; Croxhapox, Ghent; and in 2015: Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi and Bruthaus Gallery, Waregem. His work is part of several private collections as well as public ones, such as those of the BNF, Paris; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, Brussels; the Province du Hainaut, Charleroi. Michel Couturier has also produced numerous temporary and permanent interventions in public space.