L'entraînement, 2009

- 48 vertical editions, 102 x 72 cm
Linear hanging with regular interspacing.
All pictures are taken at night, in colour, with flash

“The world is full of missing cogs [...]
but it seems to me that, at least concerning our planet, the only thing that makes it turn without hitch is the fact that cogs are missing here and there” (Dojoji. Yukio Mishima).


Gaël Bonnefon confronts his photographic universe with a short story by David Chaignon, who narrates the life of a young man fighting against the mechanisms of his own life by retreating into extreme and masochistic physical training. What unites Gaël Bonnefon and David Chaignon’s research of matter, are their dramatic capturings of the world, suspended between an impeded reality and excessive fictions. These proposals both possess the same mechanism, a hazardous mechanism that leads their characters into perdition, expectation or glory.

But the training (L’entraînement) is also physical and mental preparation that the hero inflicts on himself in the text. He forever recreates himself so as not to falter. However in the photographs, the people seem to have understood that there is no training to existence despite their capacity for effort. They appear crushed by the twilight atmosphere, on the verge of annihilation.

The play of contrast between the two proposals is striking, even though they are both partly ambiguous, partly contradictory, interweaving disillusionment and enchantment, the spectacular and the derisory.