Conversation with the artist Charles Coturel

What is landscape? Based on Alain Roger’s book, “Short treatise on landscape” (Ed. Gallimard), the artist Charles Coturel will come and talk to us about his work and his vision of nature.

Charles Coturel draws flowers and plants of exuberant beauty, sometimes unloved like these invasive plants from elsewhere, objects of eradication campaigns. At the same time, it lists strange colored plants imagined by man for the cinema industry or theme park tourism, artificial plants which make up a new Eden. The liveliness of the colors or the pictorialist aspect of the grain of the drawings add to the ambivalence of a statement which questions our relationship to nature and the landscape. This same feeling is revealed in his charcoal drawings of bonsai, or more recently his paintings on canvas in acrylic, watercolor and dry pastel, of plants raised in greenhouses because they are unsuitable in our latitudes.

Charles Coturel graduated from the Angers School of Fine Arts. In 2014, he was a finalist in the FID Prize (International Drawing Competition) and in 2015, he received the Visual Arts Prize from the City of Nantes. A major personal exhibition is dedicated to him in 2022 at the Ferme des Tilleuls, Renens Cultural Center in Switzerland.