In the Place of Coincidence PDF
Written by Veronique Ricardoni   

 

© Enrique Metinides

 

On Feburary 2011, Enrique Metinides will turn seventy-seven. Fifty of those years have been dedicated to what is called in Mexico “red note” photography. Sensational images of the tabloid press, images of accidents, deaths, disasters.

 

Metinides’ images capture exquisite and compelling moments from such tragic events. His photographs a complex dynamic which both attract and repel; photographs which become engraved in our imagination through the power of the aesthetic experience.

 

The contemplation of an accident, a body, or a catastrophe, produces for the viewer ambivalent emotions: we first shield our eyes, but once this moment passes, the shock gives way to the gaze, the chance to see and face the brutality of the moment in all its power. Metinides a devotee of cinema, would seek out in the thousands of cases he photographed, the most cinematographic angle, the most dramatic moment, his images document and yet create a scene, a single image, becoming a narrative often closer to cinema than photography.

 

Enrique Metinides

 

What is unique to the Boy Metinides (El Niño Metinides), as he was known in his world of the red Note newspaper is how his images often show the panaroma, the scene, the victim and the spectator. The bigger picture; we the viewer, in turn engage in the dance, the game of mirrors, viewing those viewing the incident, the drama; the game with mirrors or the mirror game? Metinides sees simultaneously from both points of view; one side, frozen in the instance, where time is suspended, through the stillness of the corpse which filters on to everything close to it, and on the other side the duplicity of the intruder whose gaze looks on in a hypnotic trance, a spell of fascination, that morbid dance of the proximity of fragility and denial.

 

In this exhibition, “In the place of coincidence”, we invite our audience to engage with the images as enigmas, to absorb each image as a narrative, peeling back the layers as the viewer becomes more absorbed in the image in order to understand it better and so in turn, “see it clearer”, as the art historian Michel Arasse would say.

 

“In the place of coincidence” is both a survey show of the life work of Enrique Metinides, and will incorporate a film shot by Metinides, as well as newerand unknown works, documentation and ephemera.

 

This exhibition will also include, his iconic images as “Adela Rivas Legorreta atropellada por un Datsun”, “Los novios de Chapultepec” and “El Hotel Regis”, etc.

 

Enrique Metinides © Enrique Metinides

Enrique Metinides is an avid collector: ambulance and fire engine collection, and his recent work is nourished by his passion, taking a more surreal quality once removed from reality and interpreted by the photographer.

 

The intention is that this show will both give a representative sample of the color period of the career of Metinides, but also take the viewer into his world where the fictional scenes become part of his reality. As the philosopher, Paul Virilio writes, “where the accident is its own museography.”

 

Enrique Metinides

 

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Curated by Véronique Ricardoni who has worked with Metinides intimately over the last six years, “In the place of coincidence” will open the 21 of October 2010 at Garash Gallery in Mexico City.

 

 

 

 
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