trace; a homage to Bonnard

A series of works where the artist uses water and/or her own hair to perform an act in a redolent location that leaves no trace. 

These works were inspired by and in homage to painter Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), whose every day scenes shimmer with colour, intimatacy and erotic charge, yet there is always something indescribably lurking, isolated and distant.

scar

atopia

Reichstag

transience
intangible distance
disembodied

Bonnard’s wife Martha a frequent subject, often bathing, becomes a female object, scrutinised, sensuous yet her expression is always obscured by shadow, her presence alone and distant, naked, mysterious and absent. Repeated subjects are reassembled into fiction. Time ominously stands still. He blurs inside and outside through colour harmony and dissonance; on the brink of dissolving representation into abstraction; hovering disconcertingly between the flat and the three-dimensional; questioning the harmony in nature.

The titles of some of his curiously charged works became spring boards into disconcerting worlds of the artist’s own; tracing the absent presence within the frame.
© Sophie Standford, 2024