Hasted Kraeutler gallery located in the heart of New York’s Chelsea art district, is currently housing, The Dream Goes Over the Time, where Pierre Gonnard’s works will be on display for over a month.
According to the gallery “master portraitist Gonnord’s distinctive practice has developed into a lifestyle, taking him on epic journeys through back roads and uncharted terrain in search of characters that live within distinctive social groups, cut off from the rest of civilisation.”
He has been working for over a decade as contemporary art’s preeminent documentarian of globalisation’s dark underbelly—insular communities, tribes and clans that exist almost entirely off the grid, from coal miners and punks to immigrants and gypsies.
In his own words, Pierre Gonnard explains that “people from the ghettos, the outskirts of the city, that flee from a globalised world from which they feel rejected...set out with nothing more than what they have on their back and a dog as their only travel companion, embarking on a Grand Tour as nomads, with no return ticket, turning their backs on a (certain) world that no longer interests them.”
After investing much careful time and energy with these communities, Gonnord takes their pictures, capturing his protagonists against dark backgrounds from the waist up, in the manner of Old Master painting and portraiture.
He frames them as royal subjects: often, they face the camera directly and meet its gaze. In a technology-saturated contemporary world that favours self-promotion above all—through selfies, Twitter, Instagram, and innumerable other platforms for networking through social media, Gonnord gives a voice, and a face, to populations that might otherwise risk invisibility and absence from the cyber-pages of history, or even seem not to have existed at all.
The Dream Goes Over The Time, which continues Gonnord’s celebration of populations and lifestyles that are in peril, takes its name from a similarly endangered art form: poetry, in this case a poem by renowned Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. Gonnord’s series presents stark, soaring images of immense strength and beauty.
Pictured in poses and positions that are natural to them - mothers cradling their children, elderly women wrapped traditionally in thick black swaths of fabric—the artist’s subjects speak both to the personal realm and the collective realm, striking a delicate balance between cultural documentation and individual portraiture.