Twin Waves, solo show, Operativa Art Gallery, Rome
Frolicking. Gouache on engraved cork, 25 x 25 cm 2020
Sight of your sleep, Oil on engraved cork, 135 x 190cm, 2020
GM: Bea, you seem to be an extremely prolific artist, with a palpable hunger for pushing the boundaries of painting into other materials, disciplines and spheres as your practice expands into the world. You also seem to be someone who moves around with fluidity in search of opportunities and inspiration, with the freedom to let the work take you where it can grow, even if that means to step outside of the realm of contemporary art. I am wondering how in this last year of Lockdown and with all the travel restrictions in place in Italy and abroad, this sudden change of pace has affected your work in spirit and in matter. I wonder if you had any particular insights into a current investigation or trajectory that you might want to share with us.
BB: I’ve often talked about my interest in slowing down the absorption or ‘consumption’ of an artwork in shows. This year’s shift of pace meant I had less pressure to produce work to deadlines. The processes I developed became increasingly slower, more intimate, detailed and dense. Just before the pandemic erupted in Italy I’d been experimenting with painted and inlayed cork, a trajectory that continued throughout the various lockdowns and resulted in my current solo show Twin Waves at Operativa in Rome. I also wrote texts and composed my first sound piece to reflect on the shutting down of the senses, the idea of these ‘waves’ we’ve experienced again and again, the feeling of entrapment, loss of control, illness and overwhelmingness.
Proposition for a Non-religious Chapel II. Caran d’ache on paper, 200 x 150cm. 2017
Watch Me As I Fall / She Told Me a Story As Long As Her Lashes
For Boss & Baum, 2019
GM: Behind your intricate, pulsating and beautiful inlayed tapestry pieces that hang from walls and sit as objects on the floor, an incredible amount of skill is involved in putting them together. Behind all your work that is ever shifting into new physical zones, there seems to be a precision and high level of craftsmanship that holds your painterly-sculptural pieces in subtle yet solid suspense. I wonder whether material curiosity emerges first and then figure or subject matter follows when you are at the gestation period of a body of work, or if in fact you see no distinction between the two. I also wonder if and when you feel that the material possibilities of a certain way of creating work becomes exhausted, and how you deal with this if it ever happens.
BB: The two strands of material processes and subject matter run parallel to each other, holding hands, and sometimes they intertwine. The materials I use are often soft and tactile, they’re sliced and spliced back together, cut up, the images are broken up and reconfigured again and again. And the subject matter is so much about bodies that are lost, falling, in the act of breaking apart, shifting into new and different beings. Even if I push forward a medium like my tapestries for years and years, what lies at the core of the individual work there’s a whole new set of parameters. It may be an imperceptible difference, but the rules do shift. That’s what keeps me on my toes. These things revolve around two recurring conditions: softness and the cut. You can extrapolate these to vaster ideas that have to do with the mutated body and identity as it travels through tender, loving, intimate as well as conflicting, violent experiences.
Don’t Cry Upside Down, (Aquasantiera). Porcelain and black clay, 85 x 42cm, 2019 for Chimère, Solo Show, Chloe Salgado.
GM: Throughout your work pairs often seem to come together, their forms bending and running into each other so much that a new unity is temporarily created. In contrast, what was once One, seems to disintegrate and dissolve to the point of sorrow. This tender, cyclical process of coming together and falling apart of forms that are at times distinguishable, at times amorphous, feels like it emerges from a point of sincerity and emotion. Your work seems to touch upon aspects of the sensible, the tactile, the edible, the sensual in contrast with the sexual, the idea of an interior VS exterior, and vulnerability. I wonder how much of these themes in your practice emerge from an identification within the scope of some sort of archetypal feminine force, or of a new kind of femininity that can exist in the art world, transcending the polarity of feminine as non-masculine or feminine as the negation or inverse of an action that has predominantly been associated with masculinity. I wonder if these thoughts are at all relevant within the creation of the performances, objects and environments in your work.
BB: What beautiful reflections!
Everything you’ve said is very true, and I’m aware of my own contradictions as I obsess and negate the role of duality on a personal level and in the work. The work is an extension of my subconscious and conscious, irrational and rational self. I definitely play with the ancient power of archetypes and symbols, but I don’t like fixing them. I prefer letting them swim in and out of recognition and familiarity. That is why I’m so drawn to the origins of the grotesque and the spiritual role of hybridity. When you mention sorrow, tenderness, the sensual and edible, these are precisely the ideas that become enmeshed in the work as an aftermath of a sincere emotional excavation. Queerness is a mindset that I step into with my work, it’s the space to which I want to belong, to celebrate multiplicity, the entangled, non-binary identities. My recent painting Sight of your sleep plays with this. Within the parameters of a double bed, a sexy, tender scene unfolds between a fragmented and multiplying Etruscan-looking hermaphrodite and a wolf. The wolf is a charged symbol in Rome and common fairy tales, carrying both nurturing and voracious qualities within it when its gender is ambiguous. These dualities are taken as a starting point but are then shattered into a million tiny fragments.
Bea Bonafini is a Paris and Rome based artist who works across painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, textiles andinstallations. Rooted in overlapping currents from ancient and modern art history, her work touches upon aspects of the broken body, sensuality and contrasting vulnerability and eroticism. She explores the flexibility of painting and craftsmanship possibilities, expanding and compressing scale to envelop or suck the viewer in. Reference points traverse cultures, historical periods and mediums, creating multi-layered, fragmented scenarios.
Bea Bonafini’s exhibitions include Operativa, Rome (solo); Fondazione Sandretto, Guarene; Bosse & Baum, London (solo); Chloe Salgado, Paris (solo); Renata Fabbri, Milan (solo); Lychee One, London (solo); Zabludowicz Collection(solo); Fieldworks Gallery (solo); The British School at Rome; Choi & Lager, Cologne; Premio Cairo, Palazzo RealeMilan; Rolando Anselmi, Berlin; The Italian Cultural Institute, London; and TJ Boulting, London. Residenciesinclude The British School at Rome (BSR) (2019-21); Fibra Residency, Mexico (2019); Platform Southwark StudioResidency, London (2018); Fibra Residency, Colombia (2018); Fieldworks Studio Residency, London (2017); VillaLena, Tuscany (2016) and The Beekeepers Residency, Portugal (2015).
www.beabonafini.com