Susan Bonfils
Artist Statement:
Living in California the first 30 years of my life had a tremendous influence on my art, especially in the work of artists like Diebenkorn, Irwin, McLauglin and McCracken. Their treatment of light, color, space, and form introduced me to the basic elements of painting. At the same time, my undergraduate education, including in the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara, stressed a problem-oriented art, raising questions about the nature of painting and of what it could be other than the legacy that had been handed down from the Renaissance, namely, of a picture plane designed to create a virtual space of illusion.
Exploration of the possibilities of painting was already well underway in the movement to abstraction in the early 20th century, including in painters like Malevich and Mondrian. In the former, the Black Square marked a new beginning for painting (and I have been working exclusively with squares for the past 25 years), while the latter’s emphasis on what he called “a new realism” in abstract art sought an alternative to the picture plane as a space of illusion in favor of a return to the basis of painting, which included not only line and color but the platform of stretcher bars and canvas as well as the frame that places the work in relation to the wall as an event in the environment.
As I saw it, this new realism in painting was free to proceed on two different fronts: on the one hand, it would work with painting as a real event, which is to say, not as the creation of a virtual but of a real three-dimensional space, and, on the other, it would have to present our current understanding of the nature of reality.
About 15 years ago my work began to focus on color and how it could bring to light an energetic vibration within the fabric of the space of painting. If the structure of the picture plane as a theoretical object of linear perspective was the Cartesian grid of classical physics, then its disruption led me to the question of whether Einsteinian relativity would require a different sense of geometry in painting. I decided to explore its structure using a warped grid that would allow color to dance freely in a less confined and rigid order, creating a more flexible design that is in a position to display a dynamically puzzling space.
I then turned to the painting itself with an eye to gravity. The first act was to cut into the canvas, drawing with a knife along the lines of the grid in order to reveal the three-dimensionality of the apparatus. This stripping of the picture of its pictorial possibilities created strips of canvas, uncovering other surfaces on which to paint. In contrast to the flat plane of three-dimensional illusions, the twisting and tensioning of the strips creates a real space, a spiraling space full of color vibrations and, when not held up and out by metal bands, displays the curving of the canvas as subject to gravity.
In my most recent work, I have changed the focus somewhat or, to be precise, focused in on a detail of the more astrophysical images with an eye to quantum mechanics. This is, in effect, a matter of scale, as I move from paintings that stress the flexibility of the structure in works as large as 4’ x 4’, to smaller pieces, 6” x 6”, in which the grid dissolves into a field of color, exposing the nature of reality as a dynamic happening.
Artist Biography:
If I had to choose one event in my artist biography it would be meeting Harry Holtzman in December, of 1986 when he invited me to dinner and to visit his studio. In the studio, there were multiple life sized free standing paintings/sculptures arranged through out the space and smaller works on the stair landing. We had a fruitful discussion of his work and his relationship with Mondrian. He mentioned that he thought Mondrian’s Wall Works were his most significant works. It was such an honor to have met one of the founding members of the American Abstract Artists.
AAA:
Member Since: 2006
