The Frenchman Pierre Gonnord, who has lived in Madrid since the 1980s, was a great portraitist who had impeccable technique, had partly learned in ancient painting and was particularly sensitive to the victims of the turbulent history of our time.
After a long illness, Pierre Gonnord, a French-Spanish photographer, died yesterday in Madrid at the age of 60. Born in Cholet (Maine-et-Loire), trained as an economist and self-taught in the field of images, he settled in Madrid in 1988, where he soon came into contact with Juana de Aizpuru, who would prove to be a key factor in the dissemination of his work, as was the case for those of Cristina García Rodero and Alberto García-Alix, and who was their neighbor in Barquillo. A milestone in his career was the exhibition dedicated to him at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris in 2005, which showed his monumental European, New York and Asian portraits.
Always in her home country, her photo book “Regards” (2005), published by the now defunct TF, was accompanied by the foreword by Agnès de Gouvion Saint-Cyr, a very well-known person in the field of photography. The following year, the Barcelona-based Casa Asia exhibited a selection of his portraits from that continent. In 2006 he exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts in Seville. In 2007 he received the Community of Madrid Photography Prize. In 2008, he showed his cycle “Witnesses,” which focuses on displaced people (Gypsies, refugees from the civil war in the former Yugoslavia and African migrants), at the University of Salamanca, while “The Silent Interpellation” was on view as part of the exhibition as part of the Cartagena festival La Mar de Músicas.
country road
His photo book “No Man’s Land” about the rural world of Spain and Portugal with the foreword comes from 2009 Rafael Doctor, and published by Lunwerg. In the same year, the volume dedicated to him was published in La Fábrica’s collection of conversations with the same art critic as a conversation partner. Also important are his photo book “Portraits” (2013, also in La Fábrica) and his individual works in the CEART of Murcia (2013) and in the Museum of the University of Navarra (2016).
Some of the photographer’s work can be seen in the pictures
The performance of this shy, sophisticated and cultivated man as a portraitist was impeccable. As a friend of silence and chiaroscuro and fascinated by ancient painting (a bit like Bill Viola), he was always concerned with the problems of our time. “We work,” he wrote, “with the emotion and fragility of man.” Although she is less well known, we must not forget her great role as a landscape gardener who, among other things, paid attention to the cliffs and birds so important to photographers and poets.
Among his later works, his cycle “Blood is not Water” stands out, which is about the survivors and members of our diaspora in his homeland. It was on display in 2019 at the Arquerías de Nuevos Ministerios along with my exhibition “Spanish Republican Exile”. Next to each image is a folio with an oral story. With the help of the association, the exhibition then traveled to the ECCO in Cádiz on August 24, 1944, to the University of Málaga and three years later to the Halle des Blancs-Manteaux in Paris. Rest in peace.
Reporting a technical error
