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A perpetual machination or two or three things                                             

I know about Eduardo Momeñe 

Juan Manuel Bonet 

Text from the CBA catalogue (An extract)

Manolo Quejido has always liked to say that he lives in a state of perpetual scheming. I take up this term forged by the Sevillian painter based on the banks of the Manzanares, to undertake this journey through the dense and fascinating universe of Eduardo Momeñe, whose battle for photography, one of the longest and most tenacious on our scene, develops on many fronts, which end up turning him into the inhabitant of a gallery of mirrors. I also add a clearly Godardian subtitle to the machination. I really like Godard's early films, I really like the postcard scene in Les carabiniers (like Momeñe, I'm a postcard nut), and I really like a phrase I've often quoted in French: "Il faut tout mettre dans un film". Momeñe, born in Bilbao in 1952, inherited from his father (to whom the reader will find a beautiful tribute in this catalogue: a colour photograph of what was his father's film camera, a Bolex-Paillard) his love of cinema, photography and travel, and from his mother, his taste for music and literature. His love of transhumance came from the factory, which has meant that in his career, in addition to Bilbao and Madrid, cities such as Barcelona and Zaragoza have been important, as well as other smaller ones (two examples: Logroño and its exemplary Casa de la Imagen, and Pamplona, and its Museum of the University of Navarre, the institution where he studied law for a short time in its prehistory), to which his courses and conferences lead him (see in this respect his 2007 manual, reprinted several times, The Photographic Vision, which I will talk about later, and with which he launched AfterPhoto, his guadianesque but successful self-publishing and self-distribution project), as well as the Arles photography festival, and his longer stays in Paris and above all Brussels, the latter being the administrative capital of a Europe which, as we shall see later, he has travelled and photographed and thought about tirelessly, obsessively.

Momeñe is many Momeñes, it is a solid intellectual base and a lot of fiction, it is masks, it is a gallery of mirrors, and it is all true, even when it constructs little theatres, novels, endless games. Portraits and Other Fictions is the title, to make it clear from the outset, of the exhibition for whose catalogue I am writing. A title that is a somewhat retouched version of the one he gave his solo show at Metta in 2010: Portraits, video and other fictions. The oldest photos I know of him were taken when he was barely twenty years old. They document the 1972 Encuentros de Pamplona, in whose press department I worked, although we didn't have the chance to coincide at the time. His snapshots of that great event, conceived by Luis de Pablo and José Luis Alexanco on behalf of the Huarte family, show John Cage and David Tudor, Luc Ferrari, Steve Reich and Laura Dean and Phil Glass, the ZAJ, the Belgian and now Madrid-born Alain Arias-Misson... Some of these photos were published that same year, thanks to the last mentioned, in the experimental magazine Lotta Poetica, from Brescia, and were included in the exhibition dedicated to the Encounters by the Reina Sofía in 2009, curated by José Díaz Cuyás. Another avant-garde collaboration was established in 1980 with the group of Pedro Garhel and Marta Schinca. His portraits of Philip Corner, a Fluxus artist and friend of the ZAJ, who that same year gave a course at the Aula de Música de la Complutense with Alison Knowles, and visited the studio, belong to the same context. If in 1967 Momeñe already had a rock group, Old Music, at school, throughout his youth he kept a close eye on that planet. In his most widely published chronology, around 1971, we read the following, written in the third person as these kinds of documents are usually written: "Jethro Tull publishes Aqualung. He would like that tone, that strength, for his photographs". (He would later portray Ian Anderson). In the same biography, around 1972, he states: "Every month he buys French Vogue just to see the new Charles Jourdan advert by Guy Bourdin". Another epochal fact, which meant that in 1975, after abandoning his studies in economics, to his father's great displeasure, he moved to Paris with the intention of showing a portfolio to the famous fashion photographer. He would not be able to gain access to the master, but would end up working as an assistant in the studio of another then famous photographer in the same field of fashion, advertising and eroticism, the German Uwe Ommer, who was very good technically, although his work today seems very "dated" to us. Of the adolescent enthusiasms that Momeñe lists in various interviews, I like to come across a shared one: Blow Up, Antonioni's London film, which I saw in a Seville film club in the late sixties, and which overlaps a little with Zabriskie Point, one of the discoveries I made in London in 1969, when I also saw Godard's film about the Rolling Stones, as well as soaking up Hockney (who he is very interested in), the Tintin-esque Patrick Caulfield and other English pop painters. Another shared cinematographic enthusiasm: Andrei Tarkovsky, about whom he has written in Frontera Digital, praising his "art of challenging time" both in his cinema and in his photographic work. The Bilbao-born artist was also tempted by cinema at that time. His short film Andante, with music by Bela Bartók, dates from 1974; an almost motionless film, which seems to have been shot circa 1900 by a symbolist. Almost motionless, I say: all the photographer's successive, very brief, cinematographic attempts have something of the primitive quality of (slightly) moving photographs [...]