PRESENTATION: Sébastien Bonin-Oreille d’or

Sébastien Bonin uses pictorial and photographic medium. After graduating in screen printing at ENSAV La Cambre, he toured the studios to lear photographic technique. He, therefore, decides to focus on experimentation by developing a photographic language that leaves a large part to the darkroom. The light and exhibition methods are all pretext for questioning the medium.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Michel Rein Gallery Archive

Sébastien Bonin works in different media – including painting, photography and sculpture – letting the works decide which medium they need in order to best express themselves. Whether cinematographic, literary, fine art or musical, sometimes the work derives from a word, an image or a sound suggestive of various contemporary myths. Sébastien Bonin presents “Oreille d’or” his third solo exhibition in Michel Rein Gallery. Bonin is not a painter like the others. He claims neither the name nor the laurels. He loves painting in a different way and allows his canvases to choose, with an almost sentimental quality, the way they will be painted. To reach this degree of sophistication and self-abandonment, he deconditions himself, lies down in front of the smallest jolt, the smallest depression of everyday life, the smallest hassle, and thus reverses the charge of the motif. There is no logic, no system, no expectations, just a rising ebullition. But then, where is the work? How does it hold up, Bonin? By the format first. This is the only rule he imposes on himself to free himself from others. For the past four years, Sébastien has invariably painted two meters by one-forty in order to keep up the pace and cut out anything that wouldn’t fit in his skylight. If it’s powerful and it fits, he paints. If not, too bad, there is no out-of-frame. After that, only the artist’s greed for images remains, a claimed cardinal sin. To the others pride and lust, he dives with appetite into the well of the internets, being even surprised, at the bottom, to be almost alone there. There are artists who deprive themselves of all the richness of painting to find their style, and he, ready to say yes to everything, to assume everything, and even the rest: our dirty wars, stolen kisses, old guys smoking a pipe on a TV set, Babar and toxic masculinity, palm trees, Giono or Alain Fournier books, Navajo Indians, Saussure and semiology, Mentos and Coke, Magritte, Baselitz and Delacroix…   “Apps (Instagram)” (2022) is a Colorfield painted in the greatest tradition of painting, whose colors are inspired by the iconic “Instagram”, a color field ubiquitous in our lives. The canvas is deliberately matte (thanks to an encaustic) to contrast with the brightness of our screen. “Follow me” (2022) revisits the myth of Plato’s cave by imagining men having sculpted their only means of communication with the outside world. The painting testifies to a trace that our societies will leave for our future; society that sees the world through screens. The title of “Mourir avant de naître” (2022) resembles a James Bond title and questions the action of wanting to prepare one’s death before birth. Moved by a desire for eternity, the church prepares the funeral steles of its high members like the megalomaniacs of Silicone Valley who subsidize the work on eternal life. The canvas is scribbled as if to fill out an administrative form. In a naive way, the painting “Pollution lumineuse” (2022) represents a starry night, and plays the card of the aesthetics which one finds in the amateur theater. This work is thus imagined as a memory as it becomes difficult to perceive the stars due to light pollution. The work “GTA (Sextape)” (2022), reproduces the sexual act hidden in the video game Grand Theft Auto (GTA). Inspired by the color palette of the Ranxerox opus by the artist “Liberatore”, the subject of the painting highlights the clichés on the sexual act. The drawing questions the representation of one of the sexual phantasms maintained by the patriarchy. Why to have hidden it? Why to have represented it thus? The small formats paintings in the exhibition reconstitute the predominant format in the work for 5 years. They are as many reflections, annotations inked in the practice of the artist; that is to say, encounters in relation to the information of the daily life, to the contingencies also. There is nothing great or small, nothing unworthy or too noble. Everything that exists can end up in painting. Beauty is everywhere, convulsive. Bonin would like us to hold on to it and give us a grip. Frontal, tangible, of an intuitive obviousness, he strives through his work to extract from reality what is most common to humans. For this, he does not have the eye, but the ear – the ear of those who, caught up in the hubbub of existence, are still attentive and generous enough to capture far away from them a pain, a hope, a word of spirit that everything should have forced into silence.

Photo Left:  Sébastien Bonin, Falcone Exotique, 2022 oil on canvas, 40 x 30 cm (15.75 x 11.81 in), © Sébastien Bonin, Courtesy the artist and Michel Rein Gallery. Right: Sébastien Bonin, Mourir avant de naître, 2022, oil and pencil on canvas, 200 x 140 cm (78.74 x 55.12 in),  © Sébastien Bonin, Courtesy the artist and Michel Rein Gallery

Info: Michel Rein Gallery, Washington rue/straat 51A, Brussels, Belgium, Duration: 8/9-22/10/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://michelrein.com/