Alain Coiffier + Inés Montes

“Fronteras" (Frontiers)

Exhibition of photography and poems in prose / 24th March – 4th April 2014

Opens Saturday 29th March 2014 – 20:00 

“Behind that forest, there is a fire

Where words that overwhelm the memory are heard.

Let me see that precise moment of love that

Hides inside the fire, let me see

Your face in this sinter sunset that

Ignites forbidden cities…”

MONDO GALERIA presents an exhibition featuring the photographs of Alain Coiffier and poems by Inés Montes.

This exquisite collaboration has been named “Fronteras” (Frontiers) and it is precisely these borders that disappear in this exhibition. We are invited to spread ourselves across two disciples in order to understand how one supports the other.

The visual poetry of Ines and the poetic imagery of Alain are united in a deep dialogue. Their voices are lost like still images in a cinematographic projection, to give way to another concept that flies over the pages of the book. This exhibition can be seen in MONDO GALERIA from 29th March to the 4th of April 2014.

“… It is no coincidence that the title, which I believe is a visual poetry, is ‘Fronteras,’ because it is within the parameters of the poetic imagery of words and the lyrical image of a photographer, where poetry flies towards new territories of introspection, emotion and possibilities. The landscape of this work is very urban, very concretely human, and yet disturbing and emotional. Perhaps for this reason it opens by saying “It is the eyes of the city that watch, trapped under their eyelids of cement and iron.”

Adhere to these “Frontiers” of Ines Montes and Alain Coiffier. They are a powerfully poetic and aesthetic due. An invitation to intellectual and emotional thought and feelings.”

Manuel Francisco Reina

“… We stand in front of this “border” that removes us, which calls us to “pass through the mirror”… But this “expectant” attitude, which to its merit only desires self-improvement, is generating the act of creation. 

In order to express this altered reality, which we intuit obscurely, there hides a secret reserved for all of us, the poet will pose a question destined to a person without an identity, while the photographer will capture images of places that he perceives to be a mystery, certain that they are, among other reasons, the unknown reasons for our presence in the world.”

Patrick Zeyen

 

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ALAIN COIFFIER

Coiffier has dedicated his professional life to cinema, which has allowed him to collaborate for many years with prestigious figures in the world of direction, photography and graphics, such as Jean-Luc Godard, Marco Ferreri, Carlos Saura, and Francis Giacobetti. These experiences along with his Franco-Spanish bi-culture, his periodic stays in California and his numerous trips around the world have marked his personal works as a photographer.

Breaking the limits of reality, staging and dramatizing a realism drawn from its everyday context, to create the basis of a poetic narrative from observation, from the instantaneous and the study of light in places with strong resonances or even mythical auras has been his commitment for years.

Despite having stored thousands of negatives and compositions, he has only shown his work on two occasions to date:

Tierra Nueva (Madrid 2000)
Extrêmes Amériques (Paris 2006)

On both occasions he presented notebooks of poetry focusing on different photographic trips, made in young countries and/or in extreme areas of the globe: Alaska, Patagonia, Atacama, Vietnam, Nepal, Iceland…

Gather the flash of an Alaskan Inuit with the Face of a native of Chiloe Island to the South of Chile or of an indigenous one of the South of Nepal in a same expositive route can create magic… as also they do the graphism of the horizon of a desert or the tip of a glacier wound by the sun.

INÉS MONTES

Inés Montes was born in Malaga. He graduated from the University of Malaga with a degree in Hispanic Philology and later studied Theory of Literature at the University of Granada. In 1992 Montes has his poem ‘La noche y las días’ published in the editorial Parasol. His poetic work is collected in several anthologies: Literature written by women in Contemporary Spain (Litoral, magazine of poetry and thought, 1987), Sacai the other view (Collective The Factory, 1992), Artists and Contemporary Andalusian writers (ed. Andalusian Institute of Women, 1997) Women of flesh and verse (The sphere of books, 2002); As well as in catalogues: 10 Artists in Málaga, 1985, El San Sebastián, 1986. Her narrative has been published in the literary magazine Bulevar (1987) and El machinist de la generation (2007). Montes’s next appearance will be his book of stories ‘Suddenly, it is always late.’ She has collaborated with graphic works in the cultural magazines Puerta Oscura and Bulevar, having participated in turn in diverse collective exhibitions.

Through his current work he creates, together with the photographer Alain Coiffier, an artistic speech in which the image and the word are combined. Diane Arbus said that ‘photography is a secret about a secret.’ The photographer’s gaze apprehends a world that in appearance can be everyday, its transformation into the surreal happens when it stops and acquires a quality: it becomes a timeless object. Within that secret is the word. Sometimes it obscures it even more, in others it illuminates it to reveal its hidden truth, or it remains almost outside the inexpressible that arises from the nucleus of its origin. Because the words also take us naked and defenseless, moving towards that Frontier is to think the unpalatable thing.