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‘The face, situated absolutely and decisively between presence and absence, between resemblance and difference, systematically triggers a complex meditation on being, ‘oneself’ and ‘the other’. And it is precisely here – on these crucial boundaries, and summoned to reveal the stripped-down resemblance – that we find Pierre Gonnord’s portraits: works thoroughly acquainted with the genealogy of the genre and called on to tackle the deep meaning a face can contain as an expression of the individual’.

‘The people Gonnord records in his photos have always had some link or affinity: youth, lifestyles or trends, their profession or, now, a certain way of living on the fringes of the established order. But he, in contrast with the usual procedure, does not set about building the image of a group, does not seek to assert an accumulation of individualities as a collective identity. He lifts the individual out of the communal or the collective, and offers each subject self-representation.’

‘If there is a crucial element in Gonnord’s work, it is the subject’s gaze. Not a gaze given unified expression by the eyes, but one configured in the face as a whole.’

‘And it is this face, transformed into gaze, that arises autonomously out of the neutral backdrop to touch us and tell us its story. It is this face that aspires to achieve emancipation of a body capable of illuminating what lies beneath the skin’.

All the quotations are from Alberto Martín’s catalogue essay for Pierre Gonnord’s exhibition Testigos (Witnesses), presented at the University of Salamanca Photography Centre, Spain, in February-April 2008.

www.pierregonnord.com

Pierre Gonnord is represented by the Juana de Aizpuru gallery, Madrid and the France’s National Collection of Contemporary Art (FNAC).

Collections: Gallery Juana de Aizpuru, Madrid ; Gallery Olivia Arauna, Madrid; the MUSAC, León.

Pierre Gonnord

Born in 1963 in Cholet. Lives and works in Madrid since 1988.

A self-taught photographer, Gonnord came to the discipline as a teenager passionately interested in painted and photographic portraits.

Late in 1998 he began work on the human face, with the series Regards and City offering portraits of young people in urban situations. Winning a grant from the French Association for Art Action (AFAA), he spent 2002–03 in Japan: this was a time of transition during which he made portraits of young people from the suburbs, but also of yakuzas, onnagatas, geishas and inhabitants of other hermetically closed worlds. In 2004 he began investigating people leading marginal lives for reasons in some cases social or ideological and in others physical or psychological. At the invitation of the Cité Internationale des Arts, he continued these explorations in Paris in 2005. He then moved on to his current project, looking into the lives of such communities as the Gypsies of Andalusia and immigrants from the Balkans in Madrid.

His portraits have recently been shown in solo exhibitions at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris (2005), the Seville Fine Arts Museum (2006), Casa Asia, Barcelona (2006), the Santander Fine Arts Museum (2007) and the Photography Centre in Salamanca (2008).

Pierre Gonnord is represented by the Juana de Aizpuru gallery, Madrid and the France’s National Collection of Contemporary Art (FNAC).

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