At the end of 1979, then assistant film director, Michel Monteaux left France and began a career as a professional photographer in Los Angeles. Eight years later, he moved to New Mexico, in the High Desert in Santa Fe. If he continued the still life in the studio, he broadened his work to portraiture and reportage. During these six years he lives close to the Indians, espousing their culture, he is involved in a fight against their precarious situation and leads - alongside ordinary citizens but also personalities such as Robert Redford - a fight against the gigantic nuclear waste burial project in southern New Mexico.
In the mid-1990s, he returned to France and worked for the press (Liberation, Marie-Claire, Elle, La Vie, Le Monde, Géo, etc.) but also for large industrial groups (Alstom, ArcelorMittal, Total, Hachette, etc.) It was "on the job" that he discovered drawing. Encouraged by the more than positive outlook of his entourage and his artist friends, he comes to share his work more widely. In 2017, it is not only photographs but also drawings and inks that he will exhibit at Galerie Frédéric Moisan in Paris.
Michel Monteaux tirelessly seeks to share what he feels about the upheavals of the geopolitical world, of a society today launched in a desperate race while our environment tells us to slow down and think about the world that we must transform ... It is a evidence that will jump out in the eyes of anyone interested in their work. This is not guided only by aesthetic research. It is imbued with what the photographer and designer is, what he feels, his relationship to others, to the environment, to society, to the world around him ... "
Pierre Evrard
"Recognized for his activity as a photographer - portraits, reports, social facts - Michel Monteaux now questions, also through the practice of drawing, the links mysteriously uniting beings to their environment, near or far, and the symbolic orders bringing them together. Intuitively, and very reasoned, seeking to reveal the flavor of the unus mundus, of the One world, the artist raises considerable hope: and if until now we had understood almost nothing of our inscription in the world , of what makes the ten thousand beings appear and move? Visible and invisible, however, do not cease to communicate in a language that the most sensitive sometimes manage to perceive. "
Fabien Ribery
