Title: Elegy For The Mundane
Artist: Gaël Bonnefon
Lamaindonne, 2019
Hardcover
215 x 286 mm
184 pages
Text in French
First edition
ISBN: 9782956048831
Gaël Bonnefon's photography entails a questioning of the body and its commitment. Far from a conceptual or serial photography governed by a purpose and developed through a precise discourse, what his work holds at stake is founded in an abandonment to others and to the situations he crosses. Without calculation or premeditation, the body's implication, that of the gesture and of the eye, allows encounters, draws one onto hazardous and sometimes uneven paths, on whose twists and turns an image can suddenly appear.
Surrounded by childhood's landscapes, traversed by far away horizons and populated by bodies and faces, his photography develops a map of a world at once fantasized and real, where the triviality of existence stands alongside grace in a precarious and vital balance. Landscapes, situations, faces, movements are vivaciously caught and glitter at the heart of nights. They weave the stuff of the mundane, worked like a precious substance of inestimable value. This stuff is the shroud that covers up time, the other, the world, our feelings and memories but it is also a veil that is removed and that offers the gaze fragments of truth, capturing the shadows of fears, allowing promises of happiness.
- Michaël Soyez
Gaël Bonnefon's photography entails a questioning of the body and its commitment. Far from a conceptual or serial photography governed by a purpose and developed through a precise discourse, what his work holds at stake is founded in an abandonment to others and to the situations he crosses. Without calculation or premeditation, the body's implication, that of the gesture and of the eye, allows encounters, draws one onto hazardous and sometimes uneven paths, on whose twists and turns an image can suddenly appear.
Surrounded by childhood's landscapes, traversed by far away horizons and populated by bodies and faces, his photography develops a map of a world at once fantasized and real, where the triviality of existence stands alongside grace in a precarious and vital balance. Landscapes, situations, faces, movements are vivaciously caught and glitter at the heart of nights. They weave the stuff of the mundane, worked like a precious substance of inestimable value. This stuff is the shroud that covers up time, the other, the world, our feelings and memories but it is also a veil that is removed and that offers the gaze fragments of truth, capturing the shadows of fears, allowing promises of happiness.
- Michaël Soyez
