Elegy for the mundane
Gaël Bonnefon

For a long time Gaël Bonnefon titled his work About Decline. A body of photographs spread over more than ten years that pays tribute to the beauty of the banal and of the mundane. He explores its interstices between the visible and the invisible, where ordinary life reveals its dark sides. A work that evolves over the years but whose writing preserves a same coherence: here the landscapes (waterfalls, forests or deserted expanses…) vibrate with the same force and intensity as the scenes or the worn out, exhausted and breathless – but very much alive – portraits of people.
The first retrospective publication of his work, Elegy for the Mundane presents the diversity of an ever homogeneous piece that addresses violence and decline as much as softness and tenderness. Here feelings are not fixed but resonate with each other.

“What lulls the eye in Gaël Bonnefon’s work is the persistence of failing light, contrasted darkness and flash photography along with his milky skies and excessively saturated colors.” (S. Porte, Télérama n°3163)

“Gaël Bonnefon’s practice tests this spiral through his never-ending search for intensity, breaking through dead ends, passing through a world of decay in which each picture tries to take a new step forward on the wire of a reality that constantly threatens to snap and reunite with its fantasized double.” (Mickaël Soyez)

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