"Trees"
Henri Peyre & Catherine Auguste

Henri Peyre and Catherine Auguste are former students of the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, the former in painting, the latter in sculpture.

They have often worked together, and the Château de Villandry previously hosted an exhibition of joint work on still life in 2019. In it, the artists sought to produce photographs that would succeed in recovering the presence and aura of painting. 

Research in this direction has continued, but the question now concerns the landscape:

How to bring photographed landscapes closer to painting, when the photographer cannot directly intervene in them, as in still life? The path taken involves seeking out classical painting compositions, found in selected landscapes, and directing the investigation towards landscapes that recall the human presence in their creation, even if in the resulting photographs, as in still life, man is absent and only suggested. Finally, it involves the choice of lights, which recalls the origins of the notion of landscape in painting, in a 17th-century France that was inspired in everything by theatre, the art that prevailed over all others at that time. Thus, chiaroscuro reigns supreme: the foregrounds are very present but always in shadow; the main stage, which is more illuminated, awaits its actors, while a bright light shines in the distance, a divine promise of a better world, which will always escape the observer, rejected in the darkness of the foregrounds.

Exhibition to discover as part of the visit of the château.