Joan Bonnemaison, Antwerp-Based Painter in Catapult Artist in Focus

A carousel turns with no one on it. A zeppelin drifts above a washing line where two spectral figures stand among hanging sheets.

Balloons, old bicycles, and long veils pulled taut across a field recur like props for an amusement that keeps not arriving. Rendered in drowned blues and mossy greens, they dissolve every figure back into its own atmosphere.

Nothing here explains itself, and nothing is meant to. Each canvas holds its position at the hinge between what the eye registers and what the mind, unable to sit with ambiguity, quietly supplies instead.

Bonnemaison has pointed to Clément Rosset's writing on illusion as a reference point for this, not a theory to illustrate but a permission to keep the works unresolved.

"The scenes work as a bridge between two contrary worlds, the real and the illusory."

The paintings arrive at that bridge through a slow, absorptive process. Thin layers of oil soak into raw linen or canvas, each one still visible beneath the next, so that early accidents stay legible instead of being painted over.

Bonnemaison treats these accidents as material, a smear that reads as fog, a drip that becomes a fold in cloth. The compositions are worked out first through drawing, sometimes across many versions, yet the surface stays unpredictable, which is where the images actually happen.

In Hold the Dense Daylight Fog, a figure drags an immense pale veil across a field of near-black green, the cloth folding into ridges that could be fabric, water, or simply the residue of a brush finding its way.

Patriarch's Ponds, its title borrowed from the opening pages of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, holds no obvious scene from the novel at all, only the same charged stillness that precedes something inexplicable.

The same undertow surfaces in The Seventh Proof and Berlioz, both named after details from Bulgakov's book, while Could We Choose to Exist? I and III return to the carousel as recurring architecture, the motif that, in the artist's words, opened the door to zeppelins, veils, and the rest of this private cast.

Bonnemaison was born in Palma in 2001 and studied at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya before moving to Belgium for an MA in Painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp, currently underway. Literature runs alongside the studio work as directly as the painting itself, from Bulgakov to Borges' The Aleph and Jorge Amado's Captains of the Sand.

The project also extends into a self-published photobook of 35mm images shot across Belgium, a gesture borrowed from Spanish painter Luis Claramunt's own resistance to the studio as a production line.

The paintings don't ask to be solved. They ask to be entered, and left exactly as uncertain as they were found.

Instagram Joan Bonnemaison
Galería Xavier Fiol on Instagram