Sébastien Bonin

In the past he has turned his camera to the great landscapes of the American West or to the trivial details of his urban environment, but since 2013 the artist has been experimenting with the photogram technique – considered to be the forerunner of photography – to produce non-figurative photos. Playing with colour filters generally used in the cinema or theatre to modify the lighting, he has created bright colour compositions that are modulated by sharp or elusive contours. The variations, infinite yet unique, bring the work of the photographer close to that of the painter. It is like an artist painting with light.

Sebastien Bonin’s production of images has shaped itself towards formalism within an image traditionally linked to ideas of form and colour. Photograms bring Bonin to convert the mere technical relationship into pictoriality. The machine, the enlarger, the gelatine filters used in theatre and movie, the long process of fixing the scotch tapes are among other techniques that the artist uses to create an image that fragments the reality. Californian landscapes, car bodies or Navajo rugs provide an extensive source of inspiration to investigate the colours and their interaction with the light. Progressively, the colour becomes the subject itself.

Equally artificial are the photos of luxuriant vegetation that seem to have been shot at different times of the day. Their wild appearance notwithstanding, these plant beds and trees are in reality artificially built ‘sets’ the artist spotted in zoos and botanical gardens in New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, Palm Springs and other places. Once developed on photographic paper, the photos are exhibited behind coloured Plexiglas that alters the colours of the photo and creates an effect similar to day for night, the technique used to simulate night time in scenes shot in daylight. While the photograms inspired by the surface of American cars may be interpreted as illusions, what we have in the nature photos is a doubling or a mise-en-abyme of the simulacrum: artificial nature itself appears under artificial lighting. 

This exacerbated hyper-reality keeps the marks of the fabrication of its referent (literature, printed image, movies, etc.) towards its rehabilitation as an abstract reality. In this overlay of realities which substitutes the subject with a series of filters, the focus remains on repetition, disguise, caricature, stereotype and artifice while simulacra remains an essential part of Bonin’s work.

Some of his artworks are inspired by the Navajo textiles borrowed from movies and American comic books. The artist somewhat dilutes the myth of the Cowboy versus the Red Face culture by means of recuperation, reproduction, reinterpretation of woven shapes and flat tints of colour. In the meantime, the meticulously reinvented geometric compositions are employed as negative filters in order to materialise on photographic paper. The subject of the rug is reviewed by cut outs, collages and colour tests which allow to replay the fiction by duplication of frames. By isolating the real object – the Navajo rug – filtered by fiction (movie, books, etc.) and recreated by the photogram.