Olivier Richon’s recent cycle of works, made up of seven color photographs and entitled “Et in Arcadia Ego,” 1991, shows us an iconography that is repeated uniformly, with variants that don’t change the structure of the image except in the angle and in the distance of the photographic shot. Unlike his earlier pieces, these works incorporate the verbal text into the iconic text. The anonymous, impersonal nature of the shots, and the insistence upon a series of structurally similar images, bring to mind the “Modernist” photography of artists like Bernd and Hilla Becher and their numerous disciples.

Marc Couturier’s work brings to mind Paul Klee’s well-known phrase, “Art does not render the visible, it renders visible.” With a great economy of means, using ordinary objects, some as prosaic as a fishing boat, Couturier manages to make us see and feel a poetry that is inherent to the object in its natural state, suggesting a flood of concomitant memories and connotations that can be variously interpreted. We recognize in this work what we know is there.

But the objects, although they have been picked from the day-to-day, are not derived from the industrialized or technological universe.