Press Release for Beatrice Bonino's "In the main in the more" at Foundation Pernod Ricard, Paris
For Beatrice Bonino’s exhibition “In the main in the more” Bonino and Foundation Pernod Ricard present a collection of Bonino's recent work accompanied by works of contemporary and historical artists.
Bonino and her co-curator Catherine David have chosen artists who share an aesthetic affinity with Bonino’s work. They could even be said to have a common color palette–if faded is a color–but more intelligently, they are artists like Bonino for whom affinity is a type of investigation. Affinity’s basic question is: why does this go with that. The artists in the show ask questions like: what is the difference between time and trash (Dieter Roth), or a record and a bandage (Giorgo Tigkas). The peculiar similarity between the digital noise of the video camera and the snow in Lutz Bacher’s video “Snow” describes the quiet dissimilitude of a winter morning. The closeness of what is depicted and the means of making it appear elaborates the thin space of our perception––the window through which we can read the real. I read somewhere that artists are not very comfortable with the quotidian but Bonino and David’s selection is focused exactly on artists who excel there, making much more out of the everyday.
Beatrice Bonino’s proper art career is not very old. She was trained as a translator and received a phd in Sanskrit. Much is made of how this informs the logic of her work. Her sculptures are all containers in one sense or another. She makes them bare and unstable so we can't get too far from the fact that it is the way the container is put together that speaks. Language is also a container, and as a translator one has to try to understand the space between the intention of the communication and the form it is in. When transposing sentiment from one language to another something is necessarily lost. Paradoxically, or necessarily, Bonino’s work is mostly made of found material.
Bonino’s sculptures are not purposefully fragilized, but actually fragile. Made of what is left out and leftover, they are remnants of keepsakes or keepsakes made of trash. She treats this material as experience, like a writer pocketing bits of conversation and saving them for later. Her finished objects, like fictions, are testaments to brief possible realities. Bonino describes what draws her to these materials as a dull light, a dim illumination. When putting these pieces together there is a moment when the objects “turn on.” She might recompose them, turning an old picture frame into a box–literally turning it inside out, or pieces of wrapping may become receptacles for faintly drawn outlines of things. There is a possibility that these sculptures will eventually come undone. The precarity of these arrangements keep truck with the slipperiness of reality; it is hard to feel things are real, especially when we feel them the most.
If these works are also romantic, it is in the sense that meaning is driven by loss redoubled by the difficulty of describing such powerful absences. Take for example the Rilkean or Steinian Rose, an object so potently real, in color and smell and sharpness, that the desire to describe it is intensely and repetitively obsessed with its own failure. “Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet?” is a question of translation, not from one language to another but of the intimacy of experience. The rose presses against its own universality in the specificity of each instance. This rose makes me feel. There it is in a box; it is closed in, dried and died. Do you remember what it smelled like? What is the difference between this petal and this page? This rose and this name? These two chocolates; this moment and the next?