Bea Bonafini – ‘A Monstrous Fruit’

The starting point for Bea Bonafini’s exhibition of new paintings, drawings and tapestries was the labyrinth – the “winding” path that allows the viewers’ eyes to travel between the paintings with “no direct centre.” Inspired by Hermann Kern’s 1981 book on the subject, she researched this archetype, which goes back over 5000 years and is now the central theme of her artworks.

Opening her first solo exhibition ‘A Monstrous Fruit’ at SETAREH Gallery in Berlin, the London-based, Italian artist spoke to SLEEK about the meaning behind the exhibition title, the idea of “grotesque” and why we should all learn Kung Fu.

SLEEKThe title “A Monstrous Fruit” suggests a kind of “digestion” in your work. A digestion driven by the body or by time. But at the same time, the labyrinth acts as a limbo, a moment of stasis and reflection to find one’s way out. How do you think these two elements are combined in the exhibition?

Bea BonafiniAs you go through labyrinths, it’s almost like food going through an intestine, right? The structure of the labyrinth shows the maximum amount of movement taken to reach a central point within a given space.  You don’t take a direct path, you take a winding path, like a pendulum. The movement itself is something that interested me as a way to choreograph the space within a painting or between works.

The eye traverses a winding path, looking for a potential centre of gravity. In that sense, if you’re talking about digestion, there’s no direct path from your mouth to the anus. It makes maximum use of space within the body. That’s why the intestine is so infinitely long if it were straightened out – similarly to the labyrinth. In that sense, there’s a really inefficient use of energy in order to reach the centre.

S: Could you tell us more about the title of the show?

BB: I took it from a line of Euripides when he talks about the Minotaur as a hybrid creature. He refers to it as a “monstrous fruit”. That made me think of the world of the “grotesque” in art and archaeology, where the ugly and the subconscious infiltrated the walls of palaces, which is something that’s been important for my work. There’s also a dichotomy between the monstrous being something revolting that we reject, as happens to a rotting fruit, or the body of a loved one who passes away, and a fruit being something succulent and sensual that nourishes us. Then I was thinking of the remains of a body or a fruit, there are references to skeletons, backbones or internal parts that are scattered across the show.

S: In the paintings, the labyrinth is extracted from its architectural context and defined in the anthropomorphic forms of the body. Particularly in “In Earth’s Bowels,” you perceive a stomach (which many call the second brain) where emotions get stuck and influence our path. Did you want to refer to psychosomatic pains?

BB: That’s very interesting! I became fascinated with the Vagus Nerve.  This nerve travels across the body starting from the brain, moving over the stomach and reaching the groin. It’s what causes the ‘butterfly’ feeling in your stomach when you’re excited and nervous. It’s the emotional nerve of our body, it’s almost like a labyrinth unravelling. I was thinking a lot about physical and mental confinement or feeling trapped. Maybe the labyrinth’s walls are getting narrower and you’ve lost sight of the exit. I was imagining the physical inability to do something or the powerlessness to move freely. In the case of The World‘s Night for example, there’s a body whose arms are crossed over and wrap around the torso, but it’s a blissful confinement.

S: I took a course last year in UdK on grief and we addressed the subject of the Vagus Nerve, which we can control or somehow regulate through breathing. Do you do any breathing practices?

BB: I started practising Kung Fu just as I began producing this exhibition, and breath control are crucial. For example, if we exhale we can exert greater force, and we gather energy whilst inhaling.

S: Would you recommend Kung Fu then?

BB: Totally! The amazing thing with Kung Fu is that you learn from animal behaviours. There’s a sense of deep embodiment of the non-human in order to understand and balance opposing forces. The soft with the hard, flexibility and rigidity, strength and suppleness, all these dual elements. The breath going through the body is connected to the Chi. Chi is our life force. If you manage to circulate it properly around the body and harness its energy, it can be a superpower! It opened a world to me. It activates the warrior that we all have inside.

S: Reading the text of the exhibition I found it very interesting to wonder if the Minotaur ever knew touch. A sense that is explored in your work “Eternal Incandescent”, where the figure is defined by a labyrinth of hands, each hand revealing a part of the body through its touch. And the painting is divided into two parts. A dualism is present in almost all the works on display. Is it a question of two bodies in communication or of the body in communication with itself?

BB: I see it as both. It’s almost like sub-personalities in conversation. But the conversation is fragmented, I try to break the dualism apart through a repetitive fragmentation of the image. I like thinking that there are many others within a single entity. There’s also a sense of reaching out to something external. In “Eternal Incandescent” there are these hands that are crawling onto the face, like an octopus or a fluid, malleable creature that wants to protect, with so much tenderness. Its protection becomes fire-like. It’s ambivalent, the expression on the ‘egg’ face is so relaxed and blissful. There’s a sense of utter love, so much love that it multiplies inside you.

S: In your works, the void between the figures appears as a physical distance between elements of the same work (‘Plinian Fire’ and ‘Alluvial’) or in full, deep colours compared to the transparencies of the body. Especially in ‘Magma Melt’, the space between the figures becomes an image in itself. A proxemic distance between two communicating bodies. When composing the image, do you start by first defining the figure and then the space that surrounds it, or does it appear organically?

BB: I like to think that figure and void work in symbiosis. There’s a push and pull dynamic I play with while constructing a piece, and empty spaces almost have a visceral presence. Emptiness, gaping holes, rifts…they’re a bit like ghosts. Their ‘nothingness’ can become really present and can also have a sculptural role.

S: Again in “Magma Melt” at first glance I thought I saw an X-ray of the Brancusi’s Kiss sculpture. Was this intentional? 

BB: [Laughs] no way! I didn’t think about it. No, but I actually love thinking of things as an x-ray or cross-section of something – seeing through the seemingly impenetrable.