TRACES

« End of 1979, then assistant director for the cinema, Michel Monteaux leaves France and begins a career as a professional photographer in Los Angeles. Eight years later, he moves to New Mexico, in the High Desert in Santa Fe. If he continues still life in the studio, he extends his work to portrait and reportage. During these 6 years that he lives close to the Native Americans, embracing their culture. He gets involved in a fight against their precarious situation and also leads – alongside other citizens but also personalities such as Robert Redford – a fight against the WIPP site, the gigantic project of landfill of nuclear waste in southern New Mexico. In the mid-1990s, he returnes to France and works for the press (Liberation, Marie-Claire, La Vie, Le Monde, Géo…) Cultural institutions.
He also persues a personal body of work which questions our place in the environment and our relationship to different forms of reality

It was « on the job » that he discovered drawing. Encouraged by the positive look of his entourage and his artist friends, he comes to share his work more widely. In 2017, he will not only be showing photographs but also drawings and inks
Michel Monteaux tirelessly seeks to share what he feels about the upheavals of the geopolitical world, of a society launched today in a frantic race when our environment tells us to slow down and think about the world we want to transform… It is obvious that anyone who is interested in his work will notice it. It is not only guided by aesthetic research. It is imbued with what the photographer and artist is, what he feels, his relationship with others, the environment, society, the world around him … »  Pierre Evrard

“Whether he photographs rocks, waste, or a butterfly, Michel Monteaux strives to reveal a process of unity, and to follow a set of metamorphoses… Everything is therefore flow, presence, weaving, the elements live together, in a general equilibrium where the singularity of each one is consonant with the whole of a composition which accords them intimately. 

 The choice of the polaroid for certain images allows to have from the same shot, two images with different rendering. The print on the polaroid is quite close to visible reality. The negative of the snapshot reveals a very different and flexible aspect of the image. So at the same moment the material captures the same subject in two distinct and random ways. 

 « I question the links mysteriously uniting beings with their environment, near or far, and the symbolic orders bringing them together. « … the artist raises considerable hope: what if until now we had understood almost nothing of our inscription in the world, of what makes the ten thousand beings appear and move?  » 

Michel Monteaux thus attempts to constitute a harmonious set of « images » outside well-defined categories, offering a more important place to the mystery than to the subject.”

Fabien Ribery