Recent photos by Joachim Bonnemaison on display at the Michèle Chomette gallery. We received the press release, perhaps the most abstruse we’ve ever received, and couldn’t resist sharing it with you in its entirety.
To encapsulate the event created this autumn by Joachim Bonnemaison, a single word : Renaissance.
– The renaissance of the artist’s presence at Michele Chomette’s gallery, which brought him to the public’s attention in 1977, and where he exhibited for twenty years.
– A renaissance by reference to Parmigianino, whose 1524 self—portrait, following an impromptu ocular collision, drew him out of a certain dormancy in which research had been taking precedence over occasions to exhibit. lt projected him into an unexpected area — that of the portrait — and gave him the urge to share his discoveries with others.
“Besides this, in order to investigate the subtleties of art, he set himself one day to make his own portrait, looking at himself in a convex barber’s mirror. And in doing this, perceiving the bizarre effects produced by the roundness of the mirror, (. . .) the idea came to him to amuse himself by counterfeiting everything. Thereupon he had a ball of wood made by a turner, and, dividing it in half so as to make it the same in size and shape as the mirror, set to work to counterfeit on it with supreme art all that he saw in the glass, and particularly his own self () Now everything that is near the mirror is magnified, and all that is at a distance is diminished, and thus he made the hand engaged in drawing somewhat large, as the mirror showed it, and so marvellous that it seemed to be his very own. And since Francesco had an air of great beauty, with a face and aspect full of grace, in the likeness rather of an angel than of a man, his image on that ball had the appearance of a thing divine. ”
Giorgio Vasari, Vita di Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola — ll Parmigianino, Parme (1503-1540).
A renaissance, even to themselves, in their personal, social and environmental completeness, of those who confront their egos with that of the artist, at the risk of being circumscribed and configured in an image that would embrace all the forms of their identity, and incorporate the orb in which each of them lives and plies a trade, nurturing passions, leisure and dreams. Core man or woman, they are set in a shrine of their belongings, instruments and familiar objects, at one with the decor of their inner, habitual landscape. We are directly in touch with their being, their knowledge, their back stories — men, women, couples, siblings, families, nuclear cells and radiant cellular aggregates tied and textured by time, the circulation of thoughts and feelings, and interrelations with the components of a human and material milieu.
lt is the globe as a setting for the system of curves and mirrors put together by Bonnemaison as an artist, but also a researcher and an inventor who always finds the techniques he needs to further his ongoing project of deploying, curving, stretching and deepening the orthodox potential of his medium into a more complete apprehension of space, dismissing the Euclidean perspectives that have dictated every photographic platitude. Here, for the first time, he takes on the human entity in its faces, bodies, gestures and everyday apparel, within the interiority that each personality secretes, or in its chosen natural surroundings. Here, as before and elsewhere, he excels in oscillations between the general and the particular, and innovates, while remaining true to the history of representations.
This inaugural exhibition of some twenty holistic portraits gives a view of our contemporaries, and an acquaintance with them through their sphere of identity, or, in some cases, the allegories they activated, in complicity with the artist, at the point where the image was produced. Each portrait is unique, in the sense that each subject is unique. There is no question of cloning either the individual or the individual’s image; which is why, besides the exhibited works being offered for sale to collectors and institutions, as is the profession’s wont, the gallery will be giving those who wish to do so the opportunity to commission their own holistic portrait by Joachim Bonnemaison. One may thus integrate oneself, and one’s world, into the history of photography in a mutual accomplishment.
Translated from the French by Iohn Doherty
Joachim Bonnemaison
Portraits holistiques* 2010-2011 – photographies couleur sur papier argentique
Until December 22, 2011
Galerie michele chomette
24 rue Beaubourg
75003 Paris
