Louise Bonnet, with an essay by Flavia Frigeri
Hardcover, 80 pp., full color plates throughout. 9.5 x 0.5 x 11.75 in., Holzwarth Publications, 2020.
Louise Bonnet's debut monograph features 28 new works from 2017–19. “I am interested in the body. In what having a body feels like, or how we try to hide the way it feels. To contain it or control it. How it brings shame and humiliation because we cannot control it,” says Bonnet. “I am fascinated by the ornamentation of it, the extreme ways of hiding our primal origins with all this external stuff. For example, with the Hitchcock Blonde, or the renaissance portraits, where any sign of wildness is eradicated. I love all the intricate techniques used to achieve this. It’s so prevalent and all-encompassing.” (from It's Nice That's "Louise Bonnet paints exaggerated bodies as symbols of melancholy and loneliness" by Daniel Milroy Maher.)
" Bonnet does something similar with her cartoon-inspired style. Its distortions and stylization are more than a cool nod to pop culture or a simple grotesquerie; they highlight how awkward it is to be alive."
– Sharon Mizota, LA Times
"... Bonnet's figures often take up almost the entire canvas. After that, there might be a few small but significant touches. Maybe a vest made of rope (rope shows up in many of Bonnet's pieces, perhaps as a result of having a mountain climbing father), a shower nozzle, or, maybe a tree stump with a single branch containing barely two leaves. The earlier works played more nicely, contained stronger hints of illustrative qualities with nods to the likes of Guston or Saul. More recently, the paintings have begun to take on a much more muscular, minimal quality. The figures look more strained and uncomfortable, the limbs more contorted, the settings sparser and more starkly lit like post-punk odes to Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Son." Or maybe some creature that Odysseus had to wage war with on that long and perilous road back to Ithaca."
– Arty Nelson, Wall Street International
