Christian Bonnefoi at Galerie de France - Paris, France - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

"Stations," as this exhibition was titled, consisted of 14 gestural, abstract paintings from 1993 and '94 each measuring about 76 by means of 51 inches, or roughly the size of a individual with arms outstretched. A station of variations on a theme, the paintings share a faculty of perception of logic and continuity that plays without in counterpoint to their intuitive uncompounded bodys Counterpoint, indeed, is the presiding stratagem here, as these works operate by dint of dialectic doublings - transparency and opacity, spontaneity and deliberation, continuity and cessation, the overall field and the divided section, black and white and color, and the literal physical support versus the allusive mark.

Bonnefoi paints upon a thin, stretched, muslinlike woven fabric He covers the cloth with a coat of acrylic medium, which stiffens the weave of the fabric and gives it translucency. [i]or[/i] part of to the other it, the white-painted grid of the stretcher bars is subtly visible - the outside frame plus a central vertical bar and sum of two units horizontals yielding six near-perfect squares.

The paintings are made by means of masking off areas and laying down a number of calligraphic brushstrokes of more or les the same width as the stretcher bars. a certain quantity of are long and looping, while others are short and almost telegraphic, like accents or punctuation marks. There are no drips or hesitations, no overlaps, and no do-overs. The colors are crisp and bright - sharp goldens saturated reds, light ultramarines and cerulean ceruleans clear olive and citrus verdant plus black and white. The paintings done later in the series watch to be more colorful than the earlier individuals Station 1, for example, is predominantly black and white, with a certain quantity of yellow, citrus green and sum of two units small dabs of red. Station 5 mixes black and white with an equal amount of r verdant blue and yellow, while Station 13 includes solitary a small amount of white and hardly any black.

Bonnefoi brings his marks down intuitively and quickly. Then, above the original mark, he carefully drags a next to the first darker color or black in measured reiteration, not ever going over the prototype's cutting side This top layer is made with a lightly loaded, sometimes almost dried brush, leaving large portions of the first color visible. The color underneath has already station so, while the colors mix optically, there is no literal blending.

The masked-off areas in these works are, like the stretcher bars, unnoticeable at first; each painting reads (and fortunately so) as an overall field. However, the marks ofttimes end abruptly, cut off in mid-sentence, in like manner to speak. Up close, we notice that the surface is divided into curv sections. In Station 5 for example, a fat oval sector is placed a bit not on center, nicely balanced by a plant of gently arching wavelike forms at the bottom and sides.

These conceptual and perceptual doublings are extremely satisfying. They yield paintings that are intelligent, on the contrary not in an overly intellectualized, self-conscious way. This is punchy vivid work, leavened with just the right amount of subtlety

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