“The Race of a Hare” Installation view at Atelier Hermès ©Fondation d’entreprise HermèsChristian Bonnefoi (b.1948), an elderly French artist, originally worked as an art historian and theorist since the late 1960s but was inspired to become an artist after seeing the Henri Matisse centenary exhibition in 1970. His solo exhibition, The Race of a Hare is on view at Atelier Hermès through May 28.
The exhibition, with the somewhat enigmatic title The Race of a Hare will feature 19 works from six series that the artist has been working on since the mid-1970s to explore the concept and method of painting.
The artist’s work stems from the question of ‘what is painting’ and the limitations of painting encountered in modernist painting, such as Clement Greenberg’s assertion that ‘the medium’s uniqueness lies in its flatness’. Bonnefoi sought to devise a methodology that would preserve the physical two-dimensionality of painting while conceptually transcending it, imbuing it with the Baroque sense of openness and energy.
As a result of these questions, since 1974 he has used collage as the basis of his practice, cutting and gluing parts of paintings and deconstructing and reconstructing planes. These collages are done not on the usual opaque canvas, but on Tarlatan gauze or tissue paper. The permeability and porosity of the surface, characteristic of these materials, liberate the artist’s paintings from two dimensions. Indeed, his work is ‘Bi-Face’ meaning that it can be seen and experienced from both the front and back, drawing our gaze beyond the painting.
Also known as a writer, Bonnefoi’s exhibition will provide an interesting opportunity to compare his work with the emergence of a school of thought known as ‘Dansaekhwa’ in Korean contemporary art during the same period, when the Western modernist painting was struggling to overcome the problem it faced.
