Emmanuel Monzon

PRESS:

by Katherine Oktober Matthews -the Chief Editor for GUP Magazine

 “This is a tightly composed image– the photographer spotting the tonal harmony and clean, organised geometry ofthis urban highway scene. It’s another great example of the beauty in the banal that photographers such as Sinziana Velicescu and Guillaume Tomasi are building a name creating. Why it works so well though is that there is more than just an aesthetic pull. The photographer presents us with nothing that isn’t man-made,and strips the scene completely of the human life it has been built for (eventhe advertising billboard is blank). The result is, in our view, a comment on the futility of our existence, and elevates above simply a pretty image into something much more interesting”.

Patrick di Nola (Head of Reportage at Getty Images andCo-Founder and Director of Verbatim Agency)

"Emmanuel shows a mastery inframing – each element of the image is perfectly weighted to produce a balanced,assured composition. Paired with muted tones it makes for an aesthetically richimage. The blandness becomes vivid.
There’s also something in its subject matter – it conjures thoughts of our needto tame the harshest of environments; to build walls and contain nature intoneat pockets. It’s bleak in its emptiness. A suburban scene, sculpted by man,but completely uninhabitable.

Hannah Friezer"(Executive Director of the Center for Photography at Woodstock).

“One aspect I have always cherished about photography is the way some artists surprise us and broaden our perspectives. These artists make us see in new ways, and their images usually hit quite hard. Our gut reaction is immediate, though figuring out why or what might not be so simple. Emmanuel Monzon  is on a path of his own. We imagine him walking the streets in quiet solitude. He observes, peeks around corners and stops in fascination at the most unusual, even banal places. His sense of discovery is infectious. And so we perceive the magic he creates from little more than gray concrete and blue sky as a new revelation. Every door, car or tree is seen in a new way within his mastery of composition and framing. The mystery of a doorway radiating with warm light from within suddenly becomes irresistible. A randomly parked car seems to anchor the world. As we follow along with him past block after block, we can only beg to please keep walking.”

Press Release Gallery Charbon:  ART FAIR ASIA 2018

The work of Emmanuel Monzon focuses primarily on the idea of urban sprawling and the expansion of its periphery. Monzon photographs banality as though it were a Romantic painting, trying only to be “stronger than this big nothing” in controlling the space by framing the subject. His aesthetic of the banal obeys its own rules : a ban on living objects , a precise geometrical organization , and the revelation of a specific physical and mental landscape blurring the lines between city and suburb, between suburb and countryside, a process that results in an independent identity. Monzon thematically consistent work highlights things that make their surroundings appear quite empty and soulless. An unnerving set of social observations. Yet the tenderness of his colouring softens the quite harsh social comment his images tend to deliver. There is an absolute stillness in the images : nothing moves, not even time. Monzon grasps what is simple, and that is difficult.
Emptiness, absence, lack of a meaningful world : subjects are not inherently expressive yet they convey a deep sense of grief over the loss of meaning. Time has come to a stop. The absence of shadows and the pinkish grey mist often give a strong and disturbing impression of dream. Does these places really exist ? The reflection redeems and heals the wounds a mindless world inflicts on reality, and transforms an unstructured and empty present into a bearable memory.

Publication: Featureshoot Magazine: A Photographic Duet of Flesh & Spirit, Earth & Animal

...In the photographs of Antoine D’Agata, the very fabric of the flesh becomes a radiant field of energy, at once murky and diaphanous as though we might dissolve and disintegrate into our spiritual essence for a taste of eternity. In D’agata, we feel an insistent intensity, the impassioned whisper of a wordless truth that knows that pain and pleasure exist like the ouroburo, a snake eating its tail.

In counterpoint is the work of Emmanuel Monzon, which takes us to the very edges of urban sprawl. Here solidity reigns supreme, as “progress” eats its way into the landscape, ignoring the perils of climate change. In Monzon’s work, the see the last moments of the natural landscape, before the earth as it stood for millions of years is desecrated by our limitless desire for expansion. Monzon captures the banality of it all, the essential ugliness of the unstoppable development of the earth.

The soft, beige light of Monzon’s work reads like a sedative, a seductive little pill that lulls us into a false sense of entitlement as it alienates us from our true selves. Here, in this perfectly plastic world of picture perfect harmony, D’agata’s photographs acquire a new layer of depth as we consider his choice of subjects — people who could not go along with illusions we assert in the name of “normalcy.”...

EXHIBITION GALLERY RKG, Contemporary art. URBAN SPRAWL EMPTINESS

Press Release:

by Cary Benbow

The work of Emmanuel Monzon embodies an approach of capturing the aesthetic of the banal, and grasping the everyday scene in such a way as to render it both an image and a screen for the projection of wishes and fantasies in the intermediate zone between urban and rural America. The uneasy emptiness found there results in an independent identity.

Monzon’s work falls into a space bordered traditionally and contemporarily by Giorgio de Chirico, Edward Hopper, Richard Misrach, and Michael Kenna. Formal aspects of Monzon’s images echo aspects of rendering the inanimate and the animate in a play of light and shadow, forms and patterns. Monzon’s animate elements are blatantly absent, but nonetheless, this deliberate strategy is hauntingly reminiscent of their cropping, use of foreground and concentration on visual elements which Monzon uses to make a comment on urban sprawl, and the twenty-first century tension experienced between occupied and unoccupied spaces. Kenna and Misrach both deal with the subject of landscape and explore the effects of human interaction and isolation. Their visions are achieved through long exposures, or expansive vistas, but Monzon chooses to take the baton of simplicity and clarity, and drive away with it. His automotive wanderings spur meaningful photographs in his response to the land. His quiet studies of shape, form, pattern, signage and landscape are a respite amidst the uneasy ‘non-places’, which he associates to the expansion of the urban or industrial landscape in the American natural landscape.

Monzon chose to photograph the in-between state found in the American landscape. He captures places of transition. A visual segue which gives the traveller an enigma. The limbo caught by his lens holds the viewer in check, and begs the question: am I leaving someplace or entering another? The disconcerting environment inspires him. The emptiness in both the urban landscape, and in the great American spaces. He mixes two approaches: The codes of the new topographics and the concept of ‘in-between two states’ as inspired by the anthropologist Marc Auge. These transitional non-places are like intersections or passages from one world to another, such as going from a residential area to an industrial area. Monzon includes views of tourist locations which are altered by human influence. We often find a feeling of emptiness, of visual paradox when encountering these spaces when traveling throughout the United States. By displaying structures humans built to serve their own needs, but in a rare state of absolute idleness, he creates a disconcerting environment. The visual irony of the significant impact of people upon their surrounding environment, and their notable absence in his images results in an eerie, surreal tension that stops viewers in their tracks. 

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Cary Benbow is a writer and regular contributor to F-Stop Magazine and several other photography publications, including Lensculture.YIELD Magazine.

Web site: Wobneb Magazine (An online magazine featuring contemporary photography)