An ongoing exhibition of the work of Philippe Bonnet.« Without each individual's desire for expression, life would be hardly conceivable. This natural need is, generally, related to the means to fulfil it. When unfulfilled, however, it may lead to madness. The delusion of the insane and the activity of creators, painters and poets both lie in the disproportion between the desire for expression and the possibilities of liberation.To express themselves, the artists must mark out the world where the exciting and the overflowing will be transposed, on a stable surface, according to rules created as needs arise. In the immensity of the universe, a window must be opened enclosing this portion which, with all its attributes, contains the use you make of it. Man speaks and expresses himself; but, while rhetorics describes and exalts, the share left to intimate expression of the personality is fleeting. It cannot be contained in moulds prepared in advance. The tone is to speaking what the softness of a blade of grass adds to the forest. It is the world of invented gestures which hold in a smile, that of nascent movements. They signify more than their significance. While they escape from literal translation, they nevertheless specify the special truth of things and beings.Fixing one of these moments using descriptive reason is doomed to failure. Trapped in the body of time and light, with everything they include of transient and deeply anchored in the movement binding them, all these moments have in common is their need for continual transformation. Thus the relation between words and language, like the representation of nature faced with its intrinsic quality. »Tristan TzaraEditions BERGGRUEN
Phillipe Bonnet« A favourite Paris haunt of the surrealists was Place Dauphine, the narrow triangle whose shape, at the end of the ile de la Cité, reminded them of the tapering tip of a woman's legs. It is a rare tourist-free corner of the first arrondissement, complete with dim lighting, authentic brasseries and a run-down hotel, which has changed little in half a century. It is also home to the Galerie Nabokov, which this month is staging the comeback of a forgotten quasi-surrealist, Philippe Bonnet.This is a quintessential Paris show: in a setting at once redolent of the 1950s and fresh and original. Bonnet, now 80, was discovered after the second world war by pre-eminent dealer Heinz Berggruen and was a friend of Giacometti and Tristan Tzara.He has not exhibited for decades but continues to play out the battle of materiality and dematerialisation, construction and deconstruction, in paintings of nudes, fragments of bodies and still-lifes, which have an intense luminosity and interiority of being. The delicacy of his line is exquisite; using a restricted palette - ochre, pale blue-grey, beige - he builds up and scrapes away layer after layer, leaving shadowy forms, motifs hidden in the texture of paint, a palimpsest of images and traces.Hung in a grand style on peeling, faded walls, his assortment of panels on cardboard and canvas look stunning: paintings whose sombre reticence dates Bonnet to the postwar era, but whose anxiety and urgent engagement with paint is affecting and appealing today. »Financial Times 17-18 Novembre 2007 - Jackys WullschlagerDON'T MISS
by Luke George and Elizabeth Rose £6500
an ongoing exhibition of the work of french artist Philippe Bonnet