‘Bonnet’s luxurious paintings are filled with bodies that tread a fine line between Rubenesque beauty and swollen ugliness. […] Faceless heads, rotund buttocks and erect nipples are etched out in vibrant, luminescent palettes on a massive scale. These “manic exaggerations” are as much about the human psyche as they are about the physical form, and play with a sense of depth and proportion that forces the viewer to recalibrate their eye. As the artist explains, “This is what my unconscious looks like.”’
H. Black, ‘Louise Bonnet: “When I’m Painting, I Have to Obliterate My Brain Entirely”, Elephant, August 2022
‘Voluptuous bodies and bulbous extremities besiege Bonnet’s paintings. An arresting parade of odd-looking noses, nipples, oversized limbs and wig-like clusters of mostly blonde hair simultaneously summon a sense of incompletion and loss.’
F. Frigeria, ‘The Twilight of Beauty: Louise Bonnet’s Interrogation of Bodily Forms’, in Louise Bonnet, exh. cat., Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler / Holzwarth Publications, 2020, p. 5
‘All of Bonnet’s paintings seem to be suspended in time. A harrowing sense of mental and physical marginality is enforced by the vast empty spaces and the dark backgrounds against which the figures are for the most part set.’
F. Frigeria, ‘The Twilight of Beauty: Louise Bonnet’s Interrogation of Bodily Forms’, in Louise Bonnet, exh. cat., Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler / Holzwarth Publications, 2020, p. 48
‘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 the 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.’
A. Nelson, ‘Exquisite Agonies: The Art of Louise Bonnet’, in Louise Bonnet, exh. cat., Los Angeles: Nino Mier Gallery, 2018, n.p.
‘I mean…Boobs are weird. Testicles are weird. And yet they define us. What I really like is when our bodies betray us.’
L. Bonnet, ‘Exquisite Agonies: The Art of Louise Bonnet’, in Louise Bonnet, exh. cat., Los Angeles: Nino Mier Gallery, 2018, n.p.
‘Bonnet started to use oils only recently, in 2014, and the medium turned out to be the perfect way to attain plasticity. Her painted figures possess solidity and stillness. They are abstract in the sense that they become placeholders for forces that play out across the canvas as a whole. The shades and folds of skin in The Finger, or the tears or waving hair in The Rock, were resolved in such a subtle and beautiful way that they resembled the lovingly described surfaces of objects in a classical still life. As a result, the sensations of discomfort, disproportion, imbalance, or pressure were transformed into something paradoxically celebratory. Bonnet’s paintings are weird in a serious and monumental way.’
J. Benschop, ‘Review of Louise Bonnet’, in Artforum, vol. 57, no. 6, February 2019
‘I think our bodies can be embarrassing, whether it’s boobs or penises or noses, and I’m interested in the struggle to contain those things.’
L. Bonnet, ‘Interview with Louise Bonnet’, in Purple Magazine, issue 30, 2018, p. 241
‘It’s not so much the sexual aspect, but how the nipples pull at the fabric of the shirt to create tension.’
L. Bonnet, ‘Interview with Louise Bonnet’, in Purple Magazine, issue 30, 2018, p. 239
‘Bonnet’s is a world of pulsing, sometimes even grotesque exaggerations, where beings inhabit traits that fluctuate in a kind of gender-blended state. Often alone, sometimes with a counter-point, usually occupying the lion’s share of the composition, almost jammed within the framework of the canvas, with appendages acting more like geysers of feeling, manifesting from deep within. Think more beings functioning as psycho-emotional allegories wherein the inner agonies of plight emerge, baring themselves shamelessly for all the world to ponder.’
A. Nelson, ‘Exquisite Agonies: The Art of Louise Bonnet’, in Louise Bonnet, exh. cat., Los Angeles: Nino Mier Gallery, 2018, n.p.
All works: © Louise Bonnet
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