SeriesTravel by proxy – The French artist lived in the American megalopolis for fifteen years. Galvanized by the city of all possibilities, he found the freedom and the space to let his writing and his painting express itself in the same way as his music.
One of the first memories that CharlElie Couture keeps of New York would have its place in George Romero’s horror film. We are in 1981, and the Frenchie came to record Rock Poems at the Electric Lady Studio, led by producer Michael Zilka. The sun is falling on Manhattan and the skyscrapers hang only at night. “Zombies” emerge from the depths: toothless junkies, tramps rolled up in sex rugs protruding from ripped pants, desperados using a shoe as a pillow… On the 42e street, a lost man looks up, motionless in the middle of the traffic, indifferent to the raging horn blasts. CharlElie observes the scene in a mixture of fascination and dread. It was only at dawn that the scattered crowd of lost people dispersed, returning underground, into the galleries dug under the Subway…
“In 1981, New York was wild, dangerous and a little run down. Potholes screwed up the road, remembers the artist. When I came back twenty years later [en 2004] everything had changed to settle there with my family. The city was clean and “safe”, the zombies were almost gone. It was the time of crazy money and show offs showing off their riches. “
He did not come there to make a fortune, but to find himself. Defining himself as a “triathlete” practicing as much music as writing or the visual arts, he remained confined, in France, to the role of singer, whose one hit cut off his wings at the same time as he did. made it possible to gain notoriety. New York, city of the possible, has become an obsession. Already in 1981, he had the chance to meet Keith Haring, in his studio shop on Lafayette Street, selling directly from the “producer” to the “consumer” ashtrays and other small objects on which he had placed his brushes. . “Seeing him do it, I said to myself: Why not me? “
CharlElie Couture lived her American dream for fifteen years. There, he did not become a contemporary art superstar. But he sold enough works to balance his books. Above all, he was able to create freely, meeting thousands of curious and amateurs in his studio gallery, The RE-Gallery, on 36e street, the door of which was always open and which gave him the impression of having become a small trader. From his American adventure, he drew a book, New York Memories (Le Cherche Midi edition). The book looks like an intimate notebook, but the real heroine of the story is this sprawling, bubbling, radical megalopolis, whose heart-Manhattan never stops beating at 200 miles an hour.
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