Gisèle Bonin: Fragiles

The exhibition Fragiles brings together works by Gisèle Bonin, whose practice has explored notions of fragmentation, memory and disrupted intimacy for over a decade. Drawing, photography and installation intersect throughout her work: mediums through which she gives form to what escapes words, to individual trajectories and stories often left at the margins.

For many years, Bonin deliberately refrained from situating her work within a specific context, favouring the anonymity of her subjects over any explicit narrative. For the first time, she now anchors it in its original context: her voluntary work with REDA, a support network for asylum seekers in Angers.

An eye. A hand. The sole of a foot. Never an entire face, never a name. Through fragments that are either monumentally enlarged or reduced to the size of a postage stamp, the artist does not seek to represent: she seeks to make space. Space for memory, for untold stories, for lives marked by rupture. Through the grain of the paper and the slowness of her gesture, she constructs a language in which each fragment of the body becomes the site of a presence that is both restrained and deeply affecting. A fragility that resists; a presence that asserts itself through what remains unseen.

"Fragiles" is an invitation to look closely at what we often prefer not to see, and to discover, against all expectations, a form of strength.

Gisèle Bonin is from the Auvergne region, born in 1975. She cannot recall a time when she "did not draw," even though she came from a background largely unfamiliar with this form of expression, or with the arts in general. She first studied music at the Clermont-Ferrand conservatory, then literature. Having earned diplomas in classical guitar and comparative literature, she entered the Angers School of Fine Arts, from which she graduated in 2005. In 2014, she began volunteering as a French teacher with France Terre d'Asile, and went on to deepen her commitment by actively supporting organizations that assist asylum seekers and by offering drawing classes to people in exile.

She has always immersed herself, losing herself, in the contemplative and existential sense of the term, in the conception and creation of long, painstakingly detailed drawings, always tied to the human figure. For family reasons, she was confronted from earliest childhood with the painful consequences of the accident of our birth: that which we choose neither the moment nor the place of, but which determines not only our relationship to the world, but above all, the world's relationship to us. That which we do not choose, and yet must carry. The drawing of the body fragment gradually becomes an instinctive way of expressing this fault line, then cracks in general—those that cannot be put into words, or that cannot be heard—and then injustices so profound they can no longer be expressed at all. Drawing becomes, for her, a tactile, almost sculptural way of approaching the unspeakable nature of the journey: her own as much as—if not more than—that of each and every one of us.

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