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Press Articles Phillipe Bonnet « A favourite Paris haunt of the surrealists was Place Dauphine, the narrow triangle whose shape, at the end of the ile de la Cité, reminded them of the tapering tip of a woman's legs. It is a rare tourist-free corner of the first arrondissement, complete with dim lighting, authentic brasseries and a run-down hotel, which has changed little in half a century. It is also home to the Galerie Nabokov, which this month is staging the comeback of a forgotten quasi-surrealist, Philippe Bonnet. This is a quintessential Paris show: in a setting at once redolent of the 1950s and fresh and original. Bonnet, now 80, was discovered after the second world war by pre-eminent dealer Heinz Berggruen and was a friend of Giacometti and Tristan Tzara. He has not exhibited for decades but continues to play out the battle of materiality and dematerialisation, construction and deconstruction, in paintings of nudes, fragments of bodies and still-lifes, which have an intense luminosity and interiority of being. The delicacy of his line is exquisite; using a restricted palette - ochre, pale blue-grey, beige - he builds up and scrapes away layer after layer, leaving shadowy forms, motifs hidden in the texture of paint, a palimpsest of images and traces. Hung in a grand style on peeling, faded walls, his assortment of panels on cardboard and canvas look stunning: paintings whose sombre reticence dates Bonnet to the postwar era, but whose anxiety and urgent engagement with paint is affecting and appealing today. » Financial Times 17-18 Novembre 2007 - Jackys Wullschlager Philippe Bonnet « Un choix d'œuvres récentes d'un peintre qui poursuit son cheminement sans se soucier des modes. Natures mortes, paysages, portraits expriment ici une double approche, Celle d'une matière d'abord dont il joue aussi bien de la densité que de ses évanescences. Celle d'une palette ou les nuances composent parfois sur un mode qui évoque celui de la fresque - d'infimes subtilités. La figuration de Philippe Bonnet nous donne à voir le monde sur des toiles ou l'indicible semble surgir soudain, tels ces visages ou ces horizons marins : fragiles, tenus- ils n'en paraissent que plus émouvants. » B. G. Jusqu'au 30 Novembre, Galerie Nabokov, Paris 1er 01-40-46-04-36 Les Choix de l'Obs - Paris Ile de France N° 2246 du 22 novembre 2007 Philippe Bonnet Des origines au transfert  Bonnet continues with his usual themes: nudes, portraits or objects, whose elliptic line circumscribes the shape. The drawing states more than it asserts, it suggests and refuses to describe. The image seems to come back from a past that brings with it light, reviving that which was slumbering. The sudden breaks of the line, deliberate erasure of writing, sensually diluted, participate in this stratification of the surface. The vertical nudes have a hieratism immediately denied by a generous and rich paste. Same impression of suspended time with compositions in which we observe vases, bottles, placed on a table. These ordinary, everyday objects take on a feeling of rarity, like archaeological objects identified on the walls on a villa in Pompei. This formal and tactile similarity, together with a sober palette with splashes of ochres, blues and chalky whites suggest the evocation of a fresco. Sure of his profession and irreversibly engaged in his pictorial universe, Philippe Bonnet places no bounds on his freedom. The gesture is tight and dense, the artist happily pours out the light which submerges the surface. The audacity of the shifts no longer expresses photographic reality but his own, that of the painter and the poet. Galerie Nabokov, 26, place Dauphine, fie de la Cite, P. Jusqu'au 30 novembre. » La Gazette Drouot - Le Magazine N°41 dated 23 November 2007 – Lydia Harambourg Le Nouvel Obs Philippe Bonnet « Galerie Nabokov 23 place Dauphins île de la Cité 1er. 01.41.46.04.36 M° Pont-Neuf. Jusqu'au 8/12. Un choix d'œuvres récentes d'un peintre qui poursuit son cheminement sans se soucier des modes. Philippe Lejeune conçoit son travail en appliquant ce désir de "volonté". Natures mortes, paysages, portraits expriment ici une double approche. Celle d'une matière d'abord dont il joue aussi bien de la densité que de ses évanescences. Celle d'une palette où les nuances composent (parfois sur un mode qui évoque celui de la fresque) d'infimes subtilités. La figuration de Philippe Bonnet nous donne à voir le monde sur des toiles où l'indicible semble surgir soudain, tels ces visages ou ces horizons marins : fragiles, ténus, ils n'en paraissent que plus émouvants. » Le Nouvel Obs - Paris Ile de France N° 2247 du 29 novembre 2007 |