Aurélien Couput works from existing images — film archives, press photographs, documents — which he extracts from their context in order to reinscribe them within a new visual grammar. By choosing sources that are both accessible and charged with violence, he questions the mechanisms by which images produce meaning, and the ways in which our perception is shaped by habit and ideology.

Aurélie Gravelat, for her part, deploys a pictorial vocabulary of extreme economy: lines, minimal forms, restrained colours. Her work seems to seek to filter reality, to reduce it to its formal essence, to rediscover a secret geometry behind the complexity of the world. The encounter between these two practices within the gallery space creates a fertile tension: where Couput accumulates and questions, Gravelat refines and meditates. Together, they trace the two poles of a single inquiry into the nature and power of the image.

Aurélien Couput builds his work on an iconography drawn from archival documents and from cinematic and photographic sources. He is interested in images that carry testimony and that imply a certain violence. Using visuals chosen from a register that is often accessible and identifiable by the general public, he sets up a visual grammar that challenges our perception and questions the production of images.

Aurélie Gravelat: My work brings into play a pared-down vocabulary; it is perhaps about filtering what offers itself to be seen. Lines intertwine and answer one another; they are traces, folds, cuts. I seek to reduce, to take away, to reach an essential. Without any narrative procedure. To leave things suspended. To leave room for a nothing, for silences. The blanks — of the paper, the reserves or recessed spaces — are perhaps possibilities, available points.