CHRISTIAN COIGNY

On Grace

January 26th - March 1st, 2013

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The Paolo Morello Studio Gallery is extremely proud to host the sophisticated still lives and nudes of Christian Coigny, true gems of gentility and elegance. Born in Lausanne, Coigny took his first steps as a professional photographer in San Francisco, California, in the mid-Seventies. In 1975 he moved back to Switzerland, quickly earning a solid reputation as a fashion and advertising photographer and since then beginning his long-term cooperation with many luxury brands. From 1975 to 1985 he realized the posters for the Bongénie Grieder department store. In the same period, he worked at the Vitra «Celebrities» Campaign, a huge series of portraits later gathered together in a successful volume. Over the last forty years, Coigny has realized advertising campaigns, catalogues and photographic projects for outstanding clients suchs as Hermès, Chopard jewelers, Krug champagnes, Ferretti yachts, Baume & Mercier, Maurice Lacroix, and Hublot watches. Both his still lives and nudes are organized with exceptional precision, by arranging in his studio a variety of boards, panels, stools, jugs, heavy fabrics, and lightweight sheets of paper. In the soft daylight coming from one side, these compositions look fairy-like. Immersed in a suspended time, they evoke Carlo Carra’s and Giorgio Morandi’s metaphysical paintings. Large format cameras endow Coigny’s prints with a rare plasticity and an extremely wide range of nuances, a genuine tryumph of grays. Nude female figures move around in these mysterious spaces calmly, full of grace, showing their bodies in a perfect harmony. None of them is a professional model. They are friends, recent acquaintances, or more often dancers of the Linga ballet company, the heirs of Maurice Béjart, who still work at the Octagone Theatre, not far from Lutry, where Christian lives and works.