DELICIOUS GRAVITY
PAINTING BY ISABELLE BONZOM
SOLO SHOW
Exhibition from October 5 through 25, 2017
Galerie Marie-Claude Duchosal - 1 rue Ferdinand Duval, 75004 Paris
Isabelle Bonzom’s recent paintings examine and celebrate the precarity and preciousness of life. Her art is rich in paradoxes. Sensuality and tension, exuberance and restraint interpenetrate. Swimmers dive, couples embrace, trees flow, travelers circulate, rainbows cut through the space and fall on the city. Jubilation and gravity coexist. The probability of a fall and the possibility of metamorphoses are deeply intertwined.
For Isabelle Bonzom, the painting is a body living and sensual, a space for reflection, experimentation and learning through the senses. While simple at first glance, the art of Isabelle Bonzom is complex in its pictorial language altogether fresh and mature, grave and jubilatory. Her painting is sensorial thought, combining intuition and knowledge
About Isabelle Bonzom
Eric Fischl, American artist, in his text about Isabelle Bonzom, entitled “Entre nous” (Between us) :
“It is a paradox. The rift that occurs when the conflicts between the inside and the outside of our lives are made visible. You seem to be saying to me, through the vision of your painting, “If you see a leaf on fire, could you understand love? If you see trees explode with the force of a waterfall but burn hot with desire would you finally realize that love has consumed you?
Valérie Montalbetti, art historian and curator :
“In Isabelle Bonzom’s work, it is the materiality of the painting itself which allows pieces of daily life to become incarnated and to be at once astonishingly present and somewhat supernatural; it is the interplay of painted and unpainted areas, of precisely defined elements and elliptical ones, of opaque and saturated areas and others composed of transparencies, of what is given to perceive, what is only suggested and what is deliberately hidden.
In the face of a depressed and gloomy climate, Isabelle Bonzom champions a vitalistic conception of painting. Just as nature is a universe in perpetual growth and germination, yet feeding on destruction and rot, the painter does not ignore the difficulties of the human condition. However, and precisely because life is fragile and precarious, she prefers to explore its richness, while trying to preserve a capacity for amazement and wonder, letting herself be overcome by sensations and guided by intuition. Isabelle Bonzom’s painting does not ignore everyday life, she knows how to enchant it anew."
Pierre Sterckx, art critic, Beaux-Arts Magazine :
"Isabelle Bonzom paints the savor of things. She paints the fluid evolution of the flesh, the turmoil of bodies and their passages.”
Paola Cocchi, art critic and psychologist :
“Isabelle Bonzom’s painting is always on the edge, it gives a feeling of vertigo as regards the perception of images.”
Colin Lemoine, curator and art critic, Journal des Arts and L’Oeil:
“Isabelle Bonzom knows the fragility as much as the greatness of the decisive moment, its charge of unknown as well as its universal discretion… Everything melts and is in tune with everything. Everything seems necessary and evident, as if, at last, the world was seeing itself being put into words, into forms. Things make sense.“
Eunju Park, South Korean art critic, Forbes and Art Price Korea:
“In our societies that are built on the values of work and productivity as well as fixated with appearances and excessive consumption, Isabelle Bonzom’s work opens up inner and spiritual avenues. Her art recharges our batteries with vitality. An embracing vision of union with nature emanates from it.”
Helen Gramotnev, Australian art critic, Brushword :
"Isabelle Bonzom’s ability to remain receptive to her surroundings is what allows her to use painting as a way of activation... Her intelligent, highly intuitive, and multifaceted compositions demand much more than just a glance. And every time a critic writes about Isabelle, their impressions rightly attribute to her depth and maturity of thought, and feeling and breathing life in her work."
Gabino Kim, South Korean art critic :
“Isabelle Bonzom doesn’t show "La vie en rose" or some utopia. Sense and senses are intrinsically linked. In her paintings, love and pain appear as an ambivalence. It is the union of opposites, the coincidentia oppositorum.”
Françoise Stark Mornington, psychoanalyst, Le lisible dans l'illisible :
"The paintbrush of light catches the eye and captivates the viewer as it makes the object that it hides appear suddenly. Through the artist’s inventiveness, the white color and the canvas question a desire for setting in order disappearance and appearance.
Biography of Isabelle Bonzom
Isabelle Bonzom is a a painter and a muralist. She earned a Doctorate in painting, art and art history from the École Régionale des Beaux-Arts of Rennes (Brittany) and completed three years of post-graduate studies at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts of Paris. Her studio is located near Paris.
Isabelle Bonzom has been showing her work and working in situ since 1987. The Museum of Saint-Maur (near Paris) gave her carte blanche for a solo show in 1992, so did the Museum of Noirmoutier (Western France) in 1996. Invited by curator Olivier Delavallade, she participated in L’Art dans les Chapelles in 1998.
In 2000, the French Ministries of Justice and Culture jointly commissioned Isabelle Bonzom for 30 mural paintings at the Jailhouse of Saint-Malo, on the coast of Brittany. In Vendée (Western France), the Château d’Ardelay art center dedicated a retrospective exhibit to Isabelle Bonzom in 2003. In 2010, art critic Pierre Sterckx chose to show her painting in the Jouvences (Jubilations) group show he curated at the Château d’Ardelay, an unprecedented event that also gathered works by major figures of contemporary art like Tony Cragg, Christopher Wool and Julie Mehretu.
In the United States, Isabelle Bonzom participated in New York City in the Zona Red Hook Art Show in 2007 and in 2012 in the Take Home a Nude show organized by the New York Academy of Arts and Sotheby’s. In 2015, her work was included in The Selfie Show at the Museum of New Art in Detroit.
In Seoul, South Korea, her artwork was presented by the 1-2-3 Gallery as part of a group exhibit in which she was the only Western artist, the only painter and the only woman, the two other artists being South Korean, one a photographer, the other a sculptor. Currently, the Art Institute of LeeSang represents Isabelle Bonzom in South Korea.
Isabelle Bonzom’s paintings have been presented at contemporary art fairs such as Art Brussels (2005 and 2006), Art London (2008) and Art Élysées (2012). In 2007, she was selected to join a prestigious group of contemporary artists featured by UNESCO Publishing, including American painter Wayne Thiebaud and British artist Howard Hodgkin.
In Paris, the galleries Beckel-Odille-Boïcois, d’Est & d’Ouest, Robert Peirce and Boissière-Gomendio have organized solo exhibits of Isabelle Bonzom. In 2014, the artist started a collaboration with the Marie-Claude Duchosal gallery.
Paintings by Isabelle Bonzom are held by public collections in France and by private collectors and corporations in France, England, Belgium, Costa Rica, Mexico, Japan, South Korea, the United States, etc.
