The Agathe Gaillard Gallery in Paris is currently featuring Mexican Dreams, an exhibition that celebrates Mexico as seen through the eyes of two photographers: Colette Urbajtel, a Frenchwoman who made her home in Mexico, and Manuel Álvarez Bravo, the pioneer of Mexican photography.
Covering the better part of the twentieth century, Manuel Álvarez Bravo (1902–2002) has captured the timeless poetry of the Mexican avant-garde imagination inspired by literature, painting, and encounters with post-revolutionary Mexican artists and with great muralists, such as Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Ru no Tamayo. Using photography, “Don Manuel” illustrated the “diversity of his human and artistic experiences.” In Instante y revelación (1982), the writer Octavio Paz described the art of Álvarez Bravo’s photographs as “essentially poetic in their realism and sobriety, replete with images of apparent simplicity which enclose other images or generate other realities.”
Colette Urbajtel, in turn, from a very young age composed “scenes in the street or elsewhere.” She photographed Mexico and France of the 1970s and 80s. Her work is distinguished by its sensitive approach to matter as well as by “unexpected correspondences,” as Gina Rodriguez and Alfonso Morales Carrillo point out in their La Photographie mexicaine, published in January 2018. Urbajtel viewed her adoptive homeland from a European perspective, extracting the essential beauty of the land.
Manuel Álvarez Bravo’s and Colette Urbajtel’s ways of seeing are characterized by a poetic of the everyday informed by a syncretic culture typical of Mexican identity. The exhibition thus invites on a dreamlike journey through time and the interior landscape of these two artists.
Colette Urbajtel et Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Songes Mexicains
February 8 to March 31, 2018
Galerie Agathe Gaillard
3 Rue du Pont Louis-Philippe
75004 Paris
France
