ISABELLE BONZOM

AN EROTICIZATION OF THE LANDSCAPE

by Vincent Cristofoli

Vincent Cristofoli is an art historian and a curator. In 1996, as director of the Museum of the Island of Noirmoutier, in the West of France, he gave Isabelle Bonzom carte blanche to on site work related to their collections. Within the collections and outside on the walls in the surrounding streets, the artist exhibited more than 100 of her paintings. Different series were shown: Smiles, Meats, Objects ( drawings on roof tiles) and Landscapes. Vincent Cristofoli's text was published in 2003 in Isabelle Bonzom's catalogue.

"The road is like a shock. 

Shade is laid down as a laceration.

 

Isabelle Bonzom contrasts surfaces, one is fluid, the other not. She contrasts colors, too. Warm colors, cold ones, muted and vivid ones. She delights in producing not one but many marked contrasts and her palette expands and intensifies.

 

Now, she contrasts matters and hues.

The blade of the brush has left a black gash in the flesh of the support. 

 

Cut and severed, the city presents a gaping hole. The construction site is a wound.

The subtlety of the layers of flesh unveiled by the artist is, in itself, erotic. 

 

For their part, the rural landscapes are cut through by a construction site. It is the highway being built that passes; it cuts through the earth as a ploughshare, and goes deeper still.

 

Isabelle Bonzom proposes to us a state, a moment in time. Suspended. There are no regrets, only a statement of fact full of delectation...

Finally, beyond what she suggests, beyond all those faces and meats, one can bring a stream of evocative terms: rawness, execution, slaughter… All refer to a world that goes very far. 

 

Isabelle Bonzom’s painting, understood as a material, is under constant evolution. She seeks chromatic uses, she pursues her work both slowly and quickly, as a fresco painter.

Therefore, one can follow her in her paintings and feel all the innovations, all the variations, and the maturity of her brush and of her intent. Her latest paintings beget others. 

In her jubilation in the visceral act of creating, one senses that new pictorial territories are being opened to her and by her."