Akim Monet was born in Geneva, Switzerland, and studied comparative literature and art history at Cornell University, New York State.
Monet used the same rendering process for the following projects and, in 2003, he published a book entitled The space between including three different body of works: “Passage to India”, “Homage to Gaudí” and “Exotic Flowers”.”[1] Liz Christensen, Curator at the Deutsche Bank Fine Art Program said about his work: "Fascinated by the moment captured by the opening and closing of the shutter – creating what the artist calls the “burn” of the image – Monet's photographs conjure a mystery and beauty akin to alchemy.
The building, shot from a distance and mirrored in the long reflecting pool before it, is pale and ghostly, seeming to hover like a mirage against a moody burnt orange sky.
Only after trying to make sense of the pictorial space does it become clear that Monet actually turned the picture upside down, further playing with the idea of negative and positive.
The architect’s undulating, flourishing edifices -walls, caves, gates, towers- are so organic, it’s hard to tell where the manmade stops and nature takes up, particularly when rendered in Monet’s inside-out palette.
Monet also focuses more here on the kind of cropping and composing devices inherent in photography, making two towers shot from above seem so reduced in scale they look like side-by-side bowling pins, and framing them inside a rugged vertical opening in an image he says is an homage to a Barnett Newman "zip" painting.
Another in the series shows a pigeon sitting on a balcony encrusted with dazzling floral mosaics, juxtaposed with actual nature beyond that has the ethereal quality of an Impressionist landscape dissolving into dappled paint.
Again dichotomy plays a powerful role in Monet's gorgeous pictures taken in Bali of wild growth not seen on this side of the equator as well as of transvestites negating their gender in New York’s yearly Wigstock festival.
Conceptually, the two subjects hold together both in their fragility and lavish statement, and the same colors echo in each -the deep purple of the sunflower in one drag queen’s hair, for instance, is laced throughout the tropical plants.
The hothouse effect of Monet's pictures speaks to a moment when the world feels on the verge of boiling over, where the same Balinese paradise that he photographed was subsequently bombed by terrorists.
Cropped from the context of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin and delivered to a pictorial world of lush blue tonalities, these stone gods and humans enacting their timeless postures take on a taut psychological currency.
Monet's signature process of printing directly what is on his negatives rather than inverting them into positive images is what gives all his photographs their saturated, heightened palette.
Whether by highlighting elements of abstraction or teasing out moments of human drama, Monet's images bring into relief a contemporary relevancy he finds in these classical sculptures.
The idea of duality plays out even in the presentation of these Ilfochrome prints, which are two dimensional but assume the heft of stone under their boxlike lamination of thick polished Plexiglas, a nod to minimalist sculpture.
In a subtle dialogue among mediums, Monet approaches his three-dimensional subjects from a painterly sensibility and returns the traces of light stolen with his camera back to the object world.
In a subtle dialogue among mediums, Monet approaches his three-dimensional subjects from a painterly sensibility and returns the traces of light stolen with his camera back to the object world.
2006 In the Vatican Gardens ″Beauty, forever analyzed, theorized and above all experienced by who loves art, acquires a new expression and a personal dimension through the works of Akim Monet.
The traces of our past are promoted by Monet: works, sculptures, buildings, environments of the Italian artistic culture are exalted through the strength of forms and dynamics of individual gestures, which projected in the future, seem to resist indelibly to time.