Discovered at Rencontres d’Arles 2011, Fernando Montiel Klint’s photographs combine the absurd and the essential, the high and the low. These images emanate from the imaginary world of dreams and ghosts, breaking free from the patterns of rational, logical thought.
The addiction to today’s technology—forced on us at social and cultural knife-point—tend to make us beings in perpetual interaction with virtual worlds. This being is mentally excised from his organic, corporal vessel. His activities are entirely fictive.
Soul, identity, internal liberty are through the photographer’s lens reduced, like Balzac’s Peau de chagrin, to the introspection of an imaginary object. Klint creates his own introspection. He goes in search of the wandering “I”, of his soul’s liberty, of his mind’s liberty, which he finds in his meticulously orchestrated stagings.
The ability to recreate a mental vision in images is an extraordinary feat. Not only does Montiel Klint succeed, but the the visual effect is captivating. The very act of being heaves like a loud and silent breaths, artificially suspended by a creative photographic act. It hovers in as in a cloud of thoughts, at the mercy of a whimsical puppet master.
Pascale Giffard, November 2011
Fernando Montiel Klint was born in 1978 in Mexico, where he continues to live and work. He studied photography at the Escuela Activa de Fotografia and the Centro de la Imagen, Mexico. He is represented in mexico by the Galeria Fernando Pradilla, and in New York by the CTS Gallery.
Fernando montiel Klint
Until december 16
Espace Dupon
74, rue Joseph de Maistre
75018 Paris
