GLADYS BONNET: INTIMATE MYTHOLOGIES
Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.
Oscar Wilde
An Eye of the Mountain, The Guardian of the Cave, A Vertical River, A Lake of Wonders, A Glacier of Blood, The Facade of Fire: Gladys Bonnet uses painting as a diving platform to make a leap of faith into personal mythology.
Born in France in 1999, Bonnet is an artist who explores the nuances of consciousness, fears, the brittleness of existence and deeply intimate thoughts.
She opts for small, postage stamp or postcard-sized "portable" supports for her paintings, some as tiny as 2x2 cm. Painted in oil on wood, those are miniature pieces of art that you can carry with you: like reminders, like small recollections of past and future dreams, like projections of your innermost thoughts, meditations, reflections on the world around you and inside you. Moving with the rhythm of life, they immerse the viewer in a dreamlike, melancholic atmosphere.
Gladys Bonnet works on wood. Along the footsteps of the centuries-old tradition, the primer for her paintings – a neutral base coating that helps prepare the painting surface, helping the paint adhere better and last longer – is made of rabbit skin glue and Meudon white, then sanded.
Every man's memory is his private literature.
Aldous Huxley
Bonnet, like Alice wandering through her Wonderland, crafts scenes where the lines between the natural and the fantastical blur, and every shape and hue is a dream. Her works, intimate in scale, are vast in imagination – capturing moods, dreams, and the silent stories of secluded nature.
Her vision of nature – towering, rooted, yet ethereally light, with a palette that mirrors the earth's own, – balances on the fine line between raw beauty and the surreal, elegance and the untamed.
Bonnet's latest exhibition "Les interstices de la mémoire" is a journey through hidden places, forests, libraries, and caves, exploring the fragile nature of memories and the importance of their preservation.
In the modern day, where the tangible seems increasingly ephemeral, Bonnet positions her work as a bulwark against the loss of physical and symbolic memories.
The works were exhibitd at Nosbaum Reding gallery.
