Lemon and Foot

Lemon and Foot belong to a group of paintings originally shown in the exhibition 30 Ghosts (8 November – 22 December 2023) at Gagosian, New York. 30 Ghosts cited the opening lines of Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s (1917 – 2008) sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) as an inspiration for the exhibition’s title and theme: “Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.”

In connection with the exhibition, which followed on from two canvases that Bonnet exhibited earlier in 2023 (in a joint exhibition project with her husband, ceramicist Adam Silverman [born 1963], at Hollyhock House, Frank Lloyd Wright’s [1867 – 1959] first major architectural project in California and a UNESCO World Heritage Site), Gagosian wrote:

In 30 Ghosts she is concerned with the lives that precede and follow our own—each the center of its own personal universe, like connected chain links—and with ideas of continuity and the future. The works on view in New York also confront the specter of death through structural and emblematic references to seventeenth-century Dutch still-life painting, contrasting the vanitas symbols of flowers, fruit, and rich drapery with the artist’s more familiar bound and bloated human bodies.

On the topic of 17th century Dutch still-life painting one can easily identify a handful of credible potential sources of inspiration when faced with Lemon and Foot. Pieter Claesz (c. 1597 – 1660) and Willem Kalf (1619 – 1693) both excelled in the depiction of realistically rendered everyday, and luxury, objects arranged on a table, where the peel of a lemon, in the foreground, was a visually striking part of the composition.

The practice of including a meticulously painted lemon in a still life was not an artistic afterthought, but the key to understanding society at the time. It was a luxury product, its appearance in the chill of northern Europe four centuries ago a triumph of science and botany. To have lemon on your table was a sign of having arrived in society, as much as a Mercedes or a Louis Vuitton bag is today.

It was inevitable that the lemon would become integral to that other Dutch status symbol, the still-life painting in which objects, everyday and exotic, were grouped using almost photo-realistic detail. Still-lifes were produced by the thousands in the 17th century to hang on the walls of­ ­middle-class households. And no still-life was complete without a lemon, a chance for painters to demonstrate their skill, especially with the curls of peel, and purchasers to display their sophisticated tastes (in 2016 American researchers calculated that a lemon appeared in 51% of Dutch paintings by the middle of the 17th century).

Bonnet’s interpretation of this classical theme in Western art, however, probably has stronger links to Spain than to the Netherlands. The dark and, to some extent, closed composition (with a hint of claustrophobia) recalls the Spanish Baroque and the, so called, bodegón (“pantry”, “tavern”, “wine cellar”) still lifes, depicting pantry items arranged on a simple stone slab. It’s almost as if one of Sir Pieter Paul Rubens’s (1577 – 1640) voluptuous models, interpreted by Philip Guston (1913 – 1980) or Robert Crump (born 1943), “crash-landed”, with her backside towards the viewer, in Juan Sánchez Cotáns (1560 – 1627) Still Life with Game, Vegetables and Fruit (1602, 68 x 88 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid). 

The figures that populate Louise Bonnet’s paintings walk a fine line between beauty and ugliness, between absurdist, knockabout comedy and extreme psychological and physiological tension. Inhabiting sparse, eerie landscapes and boxed in by the edges of the canvas or the page, they act out dramas of profound discomfort that plumb the depths of the artist’s subconscious. The compositional arrangements exacerbate the images’ aura of physical and emotional isolation, recalling the oppressive, claustrophobic spaces of paintings by, for example, Francis Bacon (1909 - 1992). Arty Nelson writes (in ‘Exquisite Agonies: The Art of Louise Bonnet’, article in Louise Bonnet, 2018):

Bonnet’s is a world of pulsing, sometimes even grotesque exaggerations, where beings inhabit traits that fluctuate in a kind of gender-blended state. Often alone, sometimes with a counterpoint, usually occupying the lion’s share of the composition, almost jammed within the framework of the canvas, with appendages acting more like geysers of feeling, manifesting from deep within.

Drawing on a range of sources, from Old Master painting to Surrealism and underground comix, Bonnet toys with signifiers —of gender and sexuality in particular— in a playfully confrontational style. Kim Córdova writes (in ‘Critics’ Picks. Los Angeles. Louise Bonnet and Adam Silverman’, review in Artforum, Spring 2023):

Her signature style, which alludes to Baroque painting technique without quite nailing it, is complimented by the grotesque flourishes of her forms. Like the love children of R. Crumb and Vermeer, her subjects are unconstrained by the logic of traditional human anatomy because she shapes her characters more through violent force than through technical precision —flesh is pressed, twisted, gripping.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation