Christian Bonnefoi - Exhibitions

Over the past 40 years, Christian Bonnefoi has fundamentally contributed to the discussion around painting and its constitutive structure, considering it as an object in its own right. A student of Hubert Damisch and Jean-Louis Schefer, Bonnefoi worked closely with Yve-Alain Bois and Jean Clay around the journal Macula in the mid-seventies. His work has been later contextualized within revised discussions on American and French perspectives on painting, forming part of the seminal exhibition As Painting at the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2001, alongside artists such as Agnes Martin, Gerhard Richter and Robert Ryman. The exhibition proved the continuous influence Bonnefoi has had on later generations - gallery artists Cheyney Thompson, Blake Rayne and Sean Paul participated in a reading around the publication.

In accordance with the cyclical organization of Bonnefoi's work, the exhibition presents historical and new works evolving from former procedures, featuring a diverse group of paintings and collages from his “Dos” and “Babel” series.

The ground floor of the gallery presents recent works from the artist's “Dos” (back) series which emerged from Matisse’s bas-relief sculptures of the same name. The shape of the back nude is however secondary to what Bonnefoi places in the process of reversing, converting and transferring positions and materials. It is not a question of going back to figuration but of using a particular image that proves the migration of pictorial elements, their ability to combine and divide themselves. The use of transparent and porous materials such as tissue paper registers each step of the process, from the application of glue to the juxtaposition of layers, turning the work into a double-sided body.

The second part of the exhibition presents works from his series Babel, the vertical thread of his expanding work. Started in 1978, it evokes the image of a labyrinthic tower, growing vertically as division and movement reigns on the inside. Taking the canvas as a three-dimensional object, Bonnefoi sets a series of operations that aim to dismantle the unity of the plane. Babel III uses white paint and graphite, to achieve transparency and reveal the processes behind its making: rotation, drying time, and a continuous repetition of steps. In his more recent paintings from the series Bonnefoi explores further manipulations of the tarlatan, a sheer, open-weaved fabric applied in varying volumes, allowing the surface to reveal different levels of visibility. Babel VI (1988) which was part of Bonnefoi's large retrospective at Centre Pompidou in 2008, presents an image and its double, a drawing and the powder of the drawing, opposing visibility and reflectiveness.