Works
←JARDIN DE CRAIE // 2024
Prix Maison Ruinart
For its 6th edition, the Prix Maison Ruinart was awarded to photographers Edouard Taufenbach & Bastien Pourtout, a duo born of a project at the Villa Medici in 2020.
Following their residency in Champagne, Edouard and Bastien produced a series of photographs: Jardin de Craie, which explores the close relationship between the biodiversity, landscape and geology of this territory. Combining outdoor and underground photography, this project invites us into a conversation with the living, where mineral, plant and human elements merge and extend each other, without always being able to dissociate.
This project was presented as a soloshow at Paris Photo 2024 and will also be exhibited as a soloshow at Tefaf Maastricht 2025.
JE SUIS TRÈS EMBALLÉ.E // 2024
Je suis très emballé.e (That's a wrap) was exhibited at Galerie C in Paris from May 14 to June 15, 2024, and will be shown at Paris Photo this autumn. This exhibition is the second collaboration between Galerie C and artist duo Edouard Taufenbach and Bastien Pourtout.
Set in a French garden with no reference to place or period, the series of photographs Je suis très emballé.e (That's a wrap) presents a series of scenes where mineral, plant and human life merge and extend each other, without always being able to dissociate. As in theater, the set and characters are made of the same illusion, draped in the same mystery.
« Autumn is not a summer transformed. »1
There are winter walks that warm your heart and revive, at the bend in a grove or an alley, the sweet memory of summer light, a distractor of flesh, leaves and rocks.
The Je suis très emballé.e (That's a wrap) exhibition is just this kind of walk. Here, Eros, Appolon, Juno, Celadon and Astrea, Amours and Faunes, Allegories and Giants are draped in the eye of artists Edouard Taufenbach and Bastien Pourtout. These marble and granite decorations, which in fine weather exalt the space of the gardens, now don their tunic of modesty.
« When evening came I rested in the monotonous grass, And I got a taste To this interminable desire, Winged cry of trouble That light retains when it dies. »2
Behind these protective fabrics that conceal virtuoso forms, on these pedestals like stages, several affairs are being played out. Is time suspended? Are the bodies made of stone and flesh alive under these capes? In this new setting, orchestrated by the artists, mineral, plant and human life merge. They interweave and recreate scenes, poems, tributes and legends.
« Two ghosts! That's when I dream in the shadows, They come to hear and speak to me. A doubtful day shows me and hides their number. Through the boughs and the dark foliage 3
The photographs in the exhibition have been conceived around the principle of ‘wrapping’. Some of the images are the result of direct interventions by the artists in the space - like a deliberate tribute to the work of Christo and Jeanne Claude - while others are the result of their wandering. Taken together, they act like a sentence telling the story of a dormant world in the exhibition space.
A very personal cosmos suddenly takes shape before our very eyes - the two artists have in fact entitled this photographic series Cosmogony - with images of details, performances, landscapes and memories, all nourished by the same mystery, all made up of the same chimeras.
In this way, the artists play with fades, backgrounds, shadows and draperies, sculpted in turn by the wind or the hand of the duo. Combining the tricks of theatre and stagecraft, the series is a photographic poem. Edouard Taufenbach and Bastien Pourtout tell us about a winter in an imaginary garden. A winter in which, for statues, bodies and fantasies, withdrawal is sometimes tantamount to survival.
« Three noises and a brigadier, The song of day announces itself, Blossoming, playing and greening, Whether the word or the bramble hangs in the air, Drum beating to the rhythm of my fear, Salvation, opprobrium or roture, Rameau pushing Racine into his heart, I willingly bend to revoyure »4
1 Etel Adnan, Saisons, 2008.
2 Giuseppe Ungaretti, La vie d'un homme" (Vita di un uomo), « Cri », 1928.
3 Victor Hugo, Les Orientales, Fantomes , 1829.
4 Tom Masson, 2024.
LE JARDIN QUI BASCULE // 2023
« The Paradise was not vast; perfect, each form bloomed only once; one garden contained them all. »1
Le jardin qui bascule is exhibited at Galerie C in Paris from April 18 to June 3, 2023. This exhibition marks the first collaboration between Gallery C and the artist duo Edouard Taufenbach and Bastien Pourtout.
This project is, first and foremost, an attempt to build a common space, the very space of our relationship. The garden represents this space "between" us, constructed by our two perspectives, shaped by our two bodies, and cultivated by our four hands. It is a vast playground and a place of exchange, where our tastes, curiosities, ways of seeing and touching the world come together and diverge. These gardens are places of tipping points, chiasms, reversals, and false symmetries.
The exhibition plays with the repetition of forms. The recurrence of squares and matrices allows for the creation of passages and paths between the different types of artworks. Shaped by this harmony, visitors have the opportunity to shape their own intimate and mental garden.
The exhibition presents 25 original works divided into 5 typologies: "The Hedges," large silver collages created from foliage photographs; "The Herbier d'ombres" and "Les Glaneurs," series of performances; "The Légendes," photomontages blending photography and drawing; and finally, Swinguing Gardens , the digital extension of this project through a collection of NFTs.
1 André Gide, Le Traité du Narcisse, 1891
THE EDGES
From large silver prints of plant textures, we create "life-size" collages. In their realization, these artworks, through the use of scales and architecture, reveal pictorial and sensitive surfaces. Like in a labyrinth, the drawing that structures the assembly of elements (visible on the back) fades away, giving way to an immersion conducive to reverie. One seeks their way through this vegetal maze that keeps turning in on itself.
L’HERBIER D’OMBRES
The sheet, alternately stretched by our hands, becomes a screen for projecting vegetal shadows, but also a partition that both conceals and reveals our bodies and the landscape. This tilting play between our two perspectives creates the framework for an intimate and sensual garden. Between shadow and light, this series gives shape to a photographic game of hide-and-seek, where the nature around us is outlined in relief.
LES LÉGENDES
Les Légendes are photo-drawing montages that create volume, perspectives, and narratives. We use the photogram technique to impress the outline simultaneously with the negative. The result is a fragmented image where the gaze navigates from one side to the other, constructing a representation that exceeds the sum of its parts. Gardens to be crafted, imagined, and dreamed of.
LES GLANEURS
In the series Les glaneurs, the hand is at the heart of the photographic dialogue. Each of us takes turns capturing 8 Polaroids (one film) — when one triggers the shot, the other guides the hand positions. The established protocol explores the variability of arrangements within the confines of the square format frame. The images have no left, right, top, or bottom; they flip and reverse. They are organized in a matrix (4X4) that continues and doubles this work of geometric triangulation. Multiplied by the 16 images in the grid, the gestures form a set of dynamic and articulated lines. They compose repertoires of shapes, like alphabets — intimate choreographies of private signs.
THE SWINGING GARDENS
Swinging Gardens is a collection of NFTs, the digital extension of the physical exhibition. These are crypto-artworks created from silver photographs or digital videos. Configured as perpetual self-turning assemblages, they draw on the formal vocabulary of boxwood laces, Renaissance garden designs, or 17th-century French gardens.
The Swinging Gardens collection is exhibited and marketed on the platform Foundation .