Private View: Saturday 6th April 2024, 3-6pm
The Floating World
In Japanese there are two ways of writing the phrase the floating world to evoke different meanings, one describing hedonism and pleasure, the other acknowledging the ephemerality of our existence. The words themselves don’t change, it’s simply a matter of perspective.
For the Italian artist Bea Bonafini, who recently returned from a period of time spent in Japan, the point of interest is the moment in which these perspectives collide, creating a state of flux and uncertainty. In her latest series of mixed-media paintings we encounter entangled figures, feathered creatures, a spider gazing at its reflection, a raven dangling upside down from a tree. Each image, rendered in delicate, translucent layers with touches of iridescence, opens up multiple ways of seeing. Orange is Young, for instance, depicts two figures on a bed, their limbs fragmented and overlapping. The painting is a reference to Jimi Hendrix’s masterpiece Bold as love in which each colour is described as an emotion, but while the vivid hues convey a certain intensity here, it’s unclear whether what we are witnessing is an expression of passion or violence, or a combination of the both.
Meanwhile, in Styx and Ka, Souls aerial creatures spin in a vortex-like motion, seemingly caught in a process of transformation. In Styx, in particular, they swirl inwards as if being sucked towards the hole in the centre of the piece while the layers of soft-coloured pigments build in density to create an impression of heat as if the shape were burnt out of the surface. As Bonafini notes, this negative space can be interpreted in different ways – as a portal, perhaps, to a fiery underworld or, as in meditative practices, to a state of enlightenment. The red eyes at the top of the composition further play on this idea by suggesting the presence of a spirit who has the potential to be both benevolent and malevolent, depending on the viewer’s interpretation, or perhaps, the spirit’s whim.
Indeed, there is a wildness to much of the imagery that Bonafini conjures as if it is taking on a life of its own, emerging or dissolving before our eyes. This is, in part, a result of the artist’s process that deliberately allows space for slippage between colour and form: she sprays paint on to her surfaces, uses water-soluble pencils, and employs materials, such as diaphanous textiles and mirrors, that play with light and reflection. But on a conceptual level, her shifting, hybrid forms are also a resistance against the rigid definitions that confine places, objects and people – they are an expression of lightness and freedom.
