From January 10 to 26, 2020, Etendues Sauvages presents Nature Under the Skin, a photographic exhibition by Christophe Courteau, at the Espace Paul et André VERA in Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
Exhibition opening hours
Wednesday to Friday, 2pm to 7pm.
Saturday and Sunday, 3pm to 7pm.
For more information, feel free to contact us by email or by phone, at 01 77 37 03 10, and ask for Christine or Sarah.
A few words from Christophe Courteau
“NATURE UNDER THE SKIN, a brand new photographic project on the theme of animal skin, a simple artistic and photographic pretext to talk about BIODIVERSITY. This word, biodiversity, has come back into fashion today and is used in every possible way, good but also bad.
As far as I’m concerned, I’ve carried this concept of biodiversity since my earliest childhood, though back then we called it something else.
I grew up in the countryside with a love of nature, of the diversity of forms, species, functions, adaptations, colors, textures and so on… I made it a life’s path. I studied it at university to better understand and grasp it.
The NATURE UNDER THE SKIN project is simply another approach to living things, meant to spark wonder, curiosity, reflection, awareness, and intellectual distance about our place in nature. And about our future too.
At the Montier-en-Der Festival in November 2019, where the exhibition was shown for the first time, it was something to see schoolchildren immediately play the game of guessing which animal such scales or such beautiful feathers might belong to. In fact, it’s for children that I slipped in, almost unnoticed… at the entrance to the exhibition, an extreme close-up of a goldfish. A fish that many adults struggled to recognize, but that most children identified in the blink of an eye!
Scales, feathers, bare skin, fur, quills — animal skin seen up close, very close in fact, simply tells the story of life itself.
The genius of Nature is right there, in front of you. All you have to do is take your eye off the camera’s viewfinder and look.
The photograph is only a TOOL, never an end in itself.
The photograph is only a medium, the photographer is an ambassador and nothing more.
The artist is not the one who presses the shutter — no, the artist is that coding force of DNA, that force of evolution which we find so hard to understand and to defend.
Look closely at the wings of a Central American butterfly, the coat of an African antelope, or the quills of the hedgehog in your garden. It is all purity, elegance — the perfection of Nature is right there, in front of you.
How to explain that some scales are white amid others that are exclusively black? Look at how mammal hairs are arranged across their coats… Observe the subtle gradient of colors in a parrot’s feathers… Come closer and look carefully at what we are destroying a little more each day. And this project doesn’t even touch on the plant world.
But everything is connected, everything is magnificently ingenious!”
Join us in Saint-Germain-en-Laye from January 10 to 26, 2020, to discover NATURE UNDER THE SKIN and admire more than 24 large-format photographic prints.
Espace Paul et André VERA, 2 Rue Henri-IV, 78100 – Saint-Germain-en-Laye
