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ARTICLES & TALKS
about Isabelle Bonzom's painting by

Pierre Sterckx - Baldine Saint Girons

Eurydice Trichon-Milsani - Marie-France Braeckman - Annette Smith

Martine Méheut - Paola Cocchi - Vincent Cristofoli


Interview with Pierre Sterckx

Pierre Sterckx is an art critic. He writes in Beaux-Arts Magazine. He is the author of "René Magritte. L'empire des images" (Ed.Assouline,2003). In 1996, he was awarded the Great Prize of the French National Center of Scientific Research for his screenplay of a CD-Rom entitled "Le Mystère Magritte". In 2007, he has published "Holbein, outrages à la représentation" and "Le devenir-cochon de Wim Delvoye", both through the Lettre Volée publishing house. He is the author of "Tintin schizo" (Les Impressions nouvelles) and of "50 Géants de l'art américain" (Beaux Arts Éditions). In 2008, he has published "Gilles Barbier, un abézédaire" (Le Regard) and "Impasses et impostures en art contemporain" (Anabet). In 2009, he has published "Johannes Vermeer, voyages à Deflt" ( Le Puf) and "Les plus beaux textes de l'histoire de l'art"( Beaux Arts Éditions).

Pierre Sterckx: Your series of meats and bodies are one of the important vectors in everything you paint. I see your picture of people in the subway as a display window that resonates with your painting of ribs on a butcher stall.

Isabelle Bonzom: These "Subway stairs" are bodies accumulated in a given space. People go down the steps, each in a particular way and in motion. It is an activity that is repeated daily, that people do without thinking about it, and yet, as a viewer, it can be perceived as a piece of choreography. Every individual has interest: his/her look, his/her flesh tint.

P.S.: Your painting is very sanguine and carnal: there are ochers, reds, something reminiscent of blood and flesh, yet not expressionist or lacking substance. Indeed, painting meat as you do is not mortiferous, it’s the contrary of a sad passion.

I.B.: My work tries to evoke delight and jubilation at the world through the medium of painting, but without ruling out a critical outlook, on the contrary. It’s not about embellishing or idealizing the world, it’s not about being gaga in front of it. Everything depends on the way we look at things. I try to be attentive and receptive to my environment in order to see it in a positive way.

P.S.:The act of painting is, in effect, an act of sensation. Some don’t even know anymore what they feel as they face a color or a rhythm. They are immediately caught in prejudices and small concepts that prevent them from feeling...You deal with a certain type of body, with flesh which is not what we might think because we have lost our sense of carnality.

I.B.: The body I paint is alive and intense. It quivers.

P.S.: Yes, it is alive. It is maybe why the latest paintings (landscapes, crowds and even meats) feature bodies in motion. It is like being on a traveling platform. There is a sort of visual caress. The steps of the stairs are a series of markers that graduates what is impossible to graduate because it is a crowd, and then, this sort of large and oblique red area says to us: “I am a piece of flesh that one can penetrate without cutting anything, I am only an oblique”. And then, what do I find out ? The diversity of the bodies and their virtual slices, transversal cuttings.

I.B.: When I worked on those paintings, I was reconnecting with what I had dealt with a long time ago, especially in my series of Dolls ( see Biography), that is the issue of how to create passages and transitions between accumulated subjects. In fact, everything is connected, this line of people going downstairs in particular. When I was painting this, I was moving from this orange-pink to this orange-red which means the “head” and then the “arm” of the other person. It’s, in a way, a trickle of paint touches and stains. This handrail is meat and also, and most importantly, the assertion of a plane surface and the ambiguity between the foreground, the middle distance, the background and the vanishing axis.

P.S.: A double ambiguity, by the image and by the touch.

I.B.: And that makes the picture complex. I was interested in that sort of folding and flattening of the space and, at the same time, in affirming the bodies and relief.

P.S.: This picture amplifies on the "Brochette”( see Approach), a painting that offered the same thing but with a basic and horizontal approach that was saying: “I enter and leave the frame, I alternate pieces of meat and pieces of vegetables and pieces of color in a kind of fade in-fade out with substance and strength”. When, for instance, I look at “The Orange Roofs”, the painting shows an overhang view of a village with a very beautiful purple entrance through stone walls that I suddenly see as resonating with other themes such as the theme of the meat !

I.B.: The painting-touch cuts off and breaks away in some places and it stirs you toward multiplicity, not unicity. The bush is not a bush, it is a sphere treated with touches of color that overflow, and therefore, open up that form.

P.S.: Yes, in “ The Orange Roofs”, I’m just realizing that the small white wall plays the same role as the white surface on the border of “ Mass Marketing” or as the red handrail in “ Stairs in the Subway”. However, this small white wall is within the painting and works within the composition. It’s different. In your work, heterogeneity is within, and what you introduce is subtle heterogeneity.

I.B: Indeed, I do not paint only in transparence, thickness and large touches, for example. If I was doing so, it would be like a writer who would confine itself to ten words. Utilizing a system is a self-imposed restrictive measure. As far as I am concerned, I want to discover and I love to surprise myself when I paint. I consider painting as a field of experimentation. This engagement in painting is a genuine work of “scientific” research having to do with deepening knowledge.

"Le vif du sujet/ The heart of the matter", conversation with Pierre Sterckx.
Bilingual catalogue, available upon request: ib@isabelle-bonzom.org

In May 2008, there was a conference by art critic, Pierre Sterckx, and philosopher, Baldine Saint Girons about Isabelle Bonzom's painting, at the gallery d'Est et d'Ouest, in Paris.
Please click here to view excerpts of this talk.

Following is excerpts of essays by Baldine Saint Girons, Marie-France Braeckman, Eurydice Trichon-Milsani , Martine Méheut and Vincent Cristofoli. They contributed to the catalogue “Corps à Corps, terre à terre”, published in 2003 by the City of Les Herbiers in conjunction with Isabelle Bonzom’s solo exhibit at the Castle of Ardelay:

“The limpidities of Isabelle Bonzom”
by Baldine Saint Girons

Baldine Saint Girons is a professor of Esthetics and Philosophy at the University of Nanterre, Paris X. An art curator, she is also the author of many books, in particular “Le Paysage et la question du sublime (The Landscape and the Question of the Sublime)” (Editions du Seuil, 2001). She has published "Les Marges de la nuit", 2006, Editions de l'Amateur

“Strength and tranquility strike the viewer in Isabelle Bonzom’s paintings, but first, unusual limpidities. Is ‘limpid’ an equivalent to ‘liquid’ or does it derive from the Greek word lampô which means ‘shine’ ? In any case, Isabelle’s paintings combine fluidity with clarity and luminosity. Successive layers appear, rendering the viewer sensitive to history and giving the acute sentiment of the kairos , that auspicious moment when things reveal themselves and can be understood.

Watercolor is Isabelle’s medium par excellence. Look at those meats: they are painted as tenderly as a landscape. The pale pink, the carmine red and the orange appear from under the vermilion and scarlet red. The grey and the amaranth show on the surface through the beige and the white, applied with large snowy touches. From a background of black ink, emerges a rack of short rib never seen before. Two light strings guide it into levitation and the reflection of its appearance is spread on a board. By applying layers upon layers of touches, it is as if the painter transports us through the matter and makes us reach its core of phosphorescence.

Those membra disjecta offered to our sight do not reproach us for being accomplices to the cruelty of the slaughterhouse. Nothing of the cadaver here, but the radiance of the flesh that has become imputrescible.
Nothing, neither, that calls for the fork and knife, but a pure shine, a raw glory which calls for an outlook enamored of truth and organization.
All the beauty of the world is there: perfect distinction, ingenuity of production, radiant depth. The search for the beautiful, as was shown by Galien commented on by Jackie Pigeaud, lies under the thin envelopes of the skin. And nature is an inner Phidias.

No bloodiness, but a measured and restrained appearance. The short rib fleetingly looms up into our visual field, as an epiphany. Is it going to enter the canvas and disappear for ever? The triad of a dark night, a red and white short rib and a pool of light seems to emerge from a unique moment."

Click on Buon Fresco to read more about Baldine Saint Girons' text.
See other paintings from the series on the Meat

"What is tender, fragile and delectable in a man’s body"
by Marie-France Braeckman

Art historian Marie-France Braeckman is also an art collector. In the catalogue of the exhibit Isabelle Bonzom, "Corps à corps, terre à terre", she writes about Isabelle Bonzom’s series of male nudes ( 1994-2002)


"Isabelle Bonzom’s paintings convey a sense of health, solidity and sturdiness, as well as an appetite for life that run counter to the dramatic vision of sickly and suffering flesh with which we are too often presented. Isabelle invites us to look differently at the image that unites flesh and meat, an image that she translates with legible lines and outlines and with frank flat surfaces of colors. Her research leads to a vision of the male nude that no other artist, in particular no other female artist, has ever dared to express. Hers is a lucid look of jubilation that manages to render, both with modesty and boldness, what is tender, fragile and delectable in a man’s body, when that body dares to surrender and accepts to be looked at without the conventional attitudes that aim to extol the conquering virility."

See more Male Nudes here.

 

"An eroticization of landscape" by Vincent Cristofoli

Vincent Cristofoli is an art historian and a curator. In 1996, as director of the Museum of the Island of Noirmoutier, in the West of France, he gave Isabelle Bonzom carte blanche to on site work related to their collections. Within the collections and outside on the walls in the surrounding streets, the artist exhibited more than 100 of her paintings. Different series were shown: Faces, Meats, Objects ( drawings on roof tiles) and Landscapes. Vincent Cristofoli's text was published in 2003 in Isabelle Bonzom's catalogue.


"The road is like a shock.
Shade is laid down as a laceration. Isabelle Bonzom contrasts surfaces, one is fluid, the other not. She contrasts colors, too: warm colors, cold ones, muted and vivid ones. She delights in producing not one but many marked contrasts and her palette expands and intensifies. Now, she contrasts matters and hues. The blade of the brush has left a black gash in the flesh of the support.
Cut and severed, the city presents a gaping hole. The construction site is a wound.
The subtlety of the layers of flesh unveiled by the artist is, in itself, erotic.
For their part, the rural landscapes are cut through by a construction site. It is the highway being built that passes; it cuts through the earth as a ploughshare, and goes deeper still.
Isabelle Bonzom proposes to us a state, a moment in time. Suspended. There are no regrets, only a statement of fact full of delectation...
Finally, beyond what she suggests, beyond all those faces and meats, one can bring a stream of evocative terms: rawness, execution, slaughter… All refer to a world that goes very far.
Isabelle Bonzom’s painting, understood as a material, is under constant evolution. She seeks chromatic uses, she pursues her work both slowly and quickly, as a fresco painter.
Therefore, one can follow her in her paintings and feel all the innovations, all the variations, and the maturity of her brush and of her intent. Her latest paintings beget others.
In her jubilation in the visceral act of creating, one senses that new pictorial territories are being opened to her and by her."

 

“Experiencing the universal” by Martine Méheut

Martine Méheut is a doctor in Philosophy. She is the author of “Penser le Temps" (Thinking about Time), published by Ellipses Marketing and “L'invention du Bonheur" (The Invention of Happiness) published by La Table Ronde. She is also an art connoisseur and collector. In the catalogue for Isabelle Bonzom’s exhibit “Corps à corps, terre à terre”, Martine Méheut reflects on the series of faces painted by the artist between 1990 and 1992.

"The eyes of those faces are extremely present, without any notion of future or past. They are a timeless presence. Isabelle Bonzom has effaced anything concerned with anecdote, and temporality is, indeed, a form of anecdote. The faces series is about escaping out of time through fullness, rather than through stiffness. It is a living presence, it is full of life but life without time that flies, without anything ephemeral…


All I see in Isabelle’s paintings seems to be lit up. It is perfectly luminous, crystal-clear as far as light is concerned and yet, she approaches obscurity, that is to say, mystery. Through light, she reaches mystery.
Isabelle doesn’t muse, she finds what is essential. In her work, I see a return to the inside, a return to intimacy. Intimacy in the sense that I, as an human being, have shed all my singularities and found the central core again. It is intimacy as universality.
I am not interested in what is different but in what we share. Why am I moved by Isabelle Bonzom’s work ? Because I feel something I live, something that is buried somewhere and that we, human beings, probably share, thanks to a dimension in which we can live, and that is what universality is.


Universality is actual experience that one cannot reach every day or at every moment because one is dragged away and absorbed. In fact, one is absent-minded. By contrast, universality is the opposite of absent-mindedness, and something of the same nature as experience.”


"An enigma, an expansive and dreamy joy"
by Eurydice Trichon-Milsani

An art critic and a doctor in art history, Eurydice Trichon-Milsani is also a writer and a poet. Following a conversation with Isabelle Bonzom at the painter’s studio, she wrote an essay that is a sort of meditation on the theme of the flesh, a theme very present in Isabelle Bonzom’s work. Translated in English are some excerpts of her text published in the 2003 catalogue of the exhibition "Corps à corps, terre à terre", at the Château d'Ardelay, art center of the City of Les Herbiers, Vendée, France.

 

 

“Bodies alone. Sprawling, sitting, falling backwards, taking the pose of Mantegna’s Jesus-Christ, they are here like targets in an empty space, their heads missing, out of the frame of the image... Silky envelope, bared and vivid flesh, put side by side, weave a dialogue in a troubling way. The viewer finds that same interest in the rapprochement of what is within and what is outside in Isabelle Bonzom’s series of paintings about the mouth, that intimate opening of the body which is not the redoubtable “safe“ evoked by Francis Bacon. Isabelle Bonzom’s mouths, often smiling, suggest an enigma, an expansive or dreamy joy.
The effect of the “cut”, cruel in the series on the bodies, is different in the case of the landscapes. The anatomical fragments of the urban fabric are tonic and perceived as abstract compositions.
These contrasts between the figure and the environment, between the human and the matter constitute an artistic choice that stimulates the eyes as well as the thoughts. For Isabelle Bonzom, painting is visiting the world, taking ownership of it, and then, making an inventory of the world, investing the canvas with that unctuous mat aspect, that structural density which is the imprint of character.
All this abundant variety, all this moderate exuberance is a precious present which the artist lavishes at a moment when painting becomes rare.”

See more Smiles or Male nudes

 


"Delicious gravity" by Annette Smith
Art collector, Annette Smith is an Emeritus Professor of Literature at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). She has authored books and articles on the general theme of “the Question of the Other,” in the XIXth and XXth Century literatures. She is a specialist of Aimé Césaire's poetry. She is the recipient of a several awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Society of America. Her husband David R. Smith was the founder, director and later Chairman of the Board of the Caltech Baxter Gallery (1971—1987) which specialized in contemporary and avant-garde art and whose archives are now in the Archives of Contemporary Art at the Washington DC Smithsonian Institute, in the USA.

"Showers of leaves in various seasonal glory, depths of fronds disappearing into nowhere, tiny joggers barely distinct from tree trunks. A crowd, human foliage floating down subway stairs. A world perpetually gushing, created by some Danaë?

Her name is Isabelle, a Marie Mancini escaped from Louis Quatorze’s court, kicking up her heels, enormous joyous eyes, a fine waist between generous hips and breasts she manages to display by the very way she covers them.

I, a stranger, want to know why she paints those snowflake shaped dabs that make one feel the brush hurrying down, perhaps toward a final dissolution. She does not know, she says after thinking over it.

Just then, I am standing next to a tiny table on which lie several large lumps of stone, one of them halfway off the support. Instinctively, I push it back onto the table. “No, no,” Isabelle protests in alarm. “ I like things to be about to fall!”
Ha! Here we are! At this exquisite, delicious, frightening point where gravity takes over gravitas.

Wasn’t it Montaigne who wrote that where everything falls nothing falls?"

 

November 2009

Wall paintings in a jailhouse,
conversation with Paola Cocchi

In 2000, the French Ministries of Justice and Culture jointly commissioned Isabelle Bonzom for an ensemble of 30 mural paintings at the Jailhouse of Saint-Malo, on the coast of Brittany. The artist created a comprehensive pictorial program specific to the space and its residents and inspired by the theme of the sea. A catalogue documents that project. Featured in the catalogue is a conversation between Isabelle Bonzom and art critic/psychotherapist Paola Cocchi. Click here to read the French catalogue.

In June 2008, there was a talk by Paola Cocchi, psychotherapist, and Eurydice Trichon-Milsani, art critic about Isabelle Bonzom's painting,
in the gallery d'Est et d'Ouest, in Paris.
Please click here to view excerpts of this talk


Isabelle Bonzom is the author of a long conversation with American artist Eric Fischl.

Read excerpts of this talk published in May 2009 by the website Culture&Cie. The first part of the conversation is entitled The breath and the touch. The second part deals with shadows in "Ten Breaths". She has written an essay about the Ten Breaths installation: “Ten Breaths,” a place for experiment and a return to the origins

Read and see more on Writings by Isabelle Bonzom

 

More articles about Isabelle Bonzom's painting in the French version of this site, please click here.

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