Christian BONNEFOI

French painter Christian Bonnefoi was born in 1948
He lives and works in Changy and Paris.
He has been exhibiting at the Oniris gallery since 1992

Working with transparency and flexibility of material, Christian Bonnefoi's works assert themselves as artistic experiments in its own right. Remaining unconditionally in abstraction, he develops an original and personal pictorial language, mixing forms and materials, troubling all reference points.

My work develops more in the form of a constellation than in a linear form. It is a work that is never finished, but always open.

Christian Bonnefoi's work was built very early on the idea that painting and painting were not limited to a surface delimited by edges, which had to be filled by a composition responding to more or less conscious intentions or gestures, but a place that the painter can construct through his practice, by playing on all the elements that can constitute painting and its appearance, its unveiling.

All the series of paintings have a marked graphic aspect. Their base consists of charcoal "pencilings" on a plastic sheet brushed with white paint, then covered with a piece of transparent Tarlatan on which the artist traces large gestures or coloured patches; the canvas is then torn off several times, like a fresco: the glued surfaces are somehow removed, and print the reverse side of the Tarlatan. Before being definitively stretched on a stretcher, the work goes through a series of slow and complex processes, including the gestures, the material, the drying time, the possible repetition of certain operations, the tension of the canvas..., which contribute to the appearance of works that are always new and in movement.

Bonnefoi's wall collages are contemporary to the paintings of which they are in a way a form of experimentation. Produced without limits, the work of space becomes decisive: they are therefore inlays of cut-outs of coloured monochromes, created for the occasion or borrowed from other works. They are construction games, with no determined goal.

If Christian Bonnefoi insists on the importance of the work, of his procedures, if his pieces can be articulated in series, his work should not however be read as a series of systems that would develop one after the other.