ELVIRE BONDUELLE: The Rotating Painting Show, 2015
Talking about paintings one often starts immediately to think about traditional works on canvas on which illusion of a pictorial space is created. Painting as an alternative for a window. Our view converges, we look into the painting and for a while we leave the surrounding for what it is. Therefore a painting is always recognised as an autonomous object, as something to be look at or in other words to be looked through like looking out of a window.
There are painters who attempt to deny this by processing the canvas; not so much the pictorial space but the painterly effect plays the main role. Instead of the window-effect the qualities of the window-glass are pointed out. How transparent or opaque is the paint, how thick the blobs, the colours. In short, paintings with a particular processing that are nowadays known as zombie-formalism and surface-paintings. Now we look on the window instead of through it and yet we detect the thing as autonomous in the space. Space and surrounding still hardly play a role; the effect is still converging.
If there are disadvantages in painting then certainly this stubborn converging effect is one of them. A diverging view, i.e. from the painting towards it surroundings, hardly occurs. The context in which the work is shown has seldom a direct effect on the image itself as it is much more self-evident in the case of sculpture.
So, how to draw that context actively into the image? I think that here Elvire Bonduelle (1981) has found a manner with her paintings that evoke curtains (hanging in front of window-glasses). She does not deny the limits of a painting; she just uses these by putting the viewer on the wrong track for a short period. The one who doesn't keep continuously an eye on them may not notice that the paintings are now and then quarter turned by the gallerist. Exactly, the context with all its facets suddenly plays an enormous role. The works themselves stay converging, but by this action space is literally in full integrated.
Now, with a photo report like this one, it may not look that exciting and the paintings look like something we know by now, but the performance around them makes it into an interesting experience.
Niek Hendrix
There are painters who attempt to deny this by processing the canvas; not so much the pictorial space but the painterly effect plays the main role. Instead of the window-effect the qualities of the window-glass are pointed out. How transparent or opaque is the paint, how thick the blobs, the colours. In short, paintings with a particular processing that are nowadays known as zombie-formalism and surface-paintings. Now we look on the window instead of through it and yet we detect the thing as autonomous in the space. Space and surrounding still hardly play a role; the effect is still converging.
If there are disadvantages in painting then certainly this stubborn converging effect is one of them. A diverging view, i.e. from the painting towards it surroundings, hardly occurs. The context in which the work is shown has seldom a direct effect on the image itself as it is much more self-evident in the case of sculpture.
So, how to draw that context actively into the image? I think that here Elvire Bonduelle (1981) has found a manner with her paintings that evoke curtains (hanging in front of window-glasses). She does not deny the limits of a painting; she just uses these by putting the viewer on the wrong track for a short period. The one who doesn't keep continuously an eye on them may not notice that the paintings are now and then quarter turned by the gallerist. Exactly, the context with all its facets suddenly plays an enormous role. The works themselves stay converging, but by this action space is literally in full integrated.
Now, with a photo report like this one, it may not look that exciting and the paintings look like something we know by now, but the performance around them makes it into an interesting experience.
Niek Hendrix
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