Robert Couturier
Silhouettes
Sculptor of the generation of Alberto Giacometti and Germaine Richier, Robert Couturier (1905-2008) plays with figurative inventions, with silhouettes and bodies. A gateway to art, between vitalism of form and geometric rigor, Couturier breathed life into sculpture, like Gustav Mahler to the symphony, Mahler who associated the modern with dissonance, at the meeting of the lyric and the rondo burlesque. Decentering is in sculpture what dissonance is in music. Couturier is the sculptor of decentering.
For this exhibition, Claire Maingon and Thierry Dufrêne have chosen to treat silhouettes as emblematic forms of Robert Couturier’s art. “A la Silhouette”, as the shadow portraits were drawn and then cut out from the cast shadow of a face which was fashionable at the time of Etienne de Silhouette (1709-1767), minister of finance and friend of the philosophers of the Enlightenment before the latter denigrated it because of its “reductive” function. The short-lived minister had fun by having his guests sit near a parchment screen and lighting them with a lamp to cut out their shadows. Humor and the sense of unity of the figure are found in the works of Robert Couturier who has no equal in summarizing a body, an attitude, a couple, in a few essential features, in an incisive cut, making to be born a true drawing in space, a quasi-two-dimensional sculpture “with nothing in it that weighs or poses” (to use the poetic art of Verlaine) Robert Couturier, one of the most important sculptors of the post-war, in the same way as Giacometti or Richier, will have a major exhibition dedicated to the Dina Vierny gallery from May 24 to July 25. The curators, Thierry Dufrêne and Claire Maingon, eminent specialists in 20th century sculpture, will focus on the idea of the silhouette in his sculpted work.
