ALAIN BONNEFOIT sculpture | Sensuality cast in bronze

FEATURED ARTIST

Sensuality casted in bronze.

ALAIN BONNEFOIT:

SENSUALITY CAST IN BRONZE

Sinuous lines, essential strokes, and a lifetime's devotion to the theme of the female body and soul. Since the foundation of KALPA Galleries in 2019, we have been honored to represent the long-term research and career of French maestro Alain Bonnefoit (Montmartre, Paris, 1937) and his corpus of rare sculptures.

Internationally acclaimed as a painter, Bonnefoit’s distinctive style embraces the use of various techniques, ranging from oil and watercolour to lithographs, Sumi-e and sculpture in bronze, marble and alabaster, with the sole purpose of giving life to the endless variations of femininity in a sphere of dream and calm sensuality.

Today at KALPA, we have the privilege to exhibit a selection of the artist's ultimate bronze sculptures named Elan, Pomone and Apollinia, which hold a significant bond with the Galleries' Tuscan origins. Indeed, with the same intent of a fin-de-siècle artist, from 1965 Bonnefoit has been spending his life between the busy Parisian art scene and the bucolic environs of the Tuscan countryside, where these sculptures were cast.

"Bonnefoit captures and sings the naked evidence of the body in a luminescent material, and invites us towards the concealed consistency of feeling and thought, memory and dream, with sign-like gestures, glances and impulses that express vitality, abandonment to the light, quiet complicity and empathic reflection."

Bonnefoit's sculpture is intimate, introspective, and aims to grasp the nature of the eternal feminine, which is the secret at the core of every woman as the source of life. Featuring a patina of different shades of dark green, brown and black colours - characteristic of the bronze material - each of them is presented by the artist as an archetypal goddess to be admired and revered, enclosing a private and hidden universe.

Between figurative and abstract representation, his female portraits are round and smooth, they live. Even more evident than in his drawings and paintings, in these sculptural works the human portrayal is brought to its essence, a harmonious and soft encounter of lines, concave and converse surfaces, a synthesis of carnality and emotion.

With reminiscences of the fluctuating signs and colours of Matisse and Dufy, as well as the plasticity of Arp, Moore and his life maestro Volti, Bonnefoit’s work liaises with the female conceptual vision portrayed by Modigliani and Klimt. As in painting as in sculpture, Bonnefoit's women enter the history of art by fitting into the iconography of the reclining, seated or crouching woman of the 19th-century French school initiated with Courbet.

"Underneath the elegance of the line lies the soul of the artist; this is how the invisible is revealed, the other aspect of the work that is for me the focus of my practice."

- Alain Bonnefoit

"The woman is at the centre of Bonnefoit's gentle world. The artist invites us to look at her as a delicate and potent creature through his eyes. She becomes an object of tenderness and a recipient of carnal impulses, a faithful companion and lover [...]"

In 1973, Bonnefoit made the first of his many further visits to Japan, where he discovered and studied Sumi-e, becoming a master in such discipline. Particularly after learning the technique of making a figure with a single and meditated gesture without ever taking the brush off the paper, the artist depicts a life made up of bodies and glances.

Alongside his corpus of work, Bonnefoit's vast knowledge and passion for the Orient are vivid in the actual physical space of his art studio. Exotic and colourful images, and primitive objects such as totems, tribal masks and silk kimonos are displayed like precious relics. Objects that belong to a distant past now witness the story of two lives that have made art their mission.

"Sumi-e, i.e. the Japanese art of water-based ink painting, wins Bonnefoit over for the large and ritual movements, the lenticular precision of the creative performative act, and the planning ability of a man who cannot make mistakes [...]"

Bonnefoit is one of the most highly acclaimed painters of female nudes working today. In Paris, the artist attended L’Ecole des Arts Appliqué in 1953 and L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1956, before enrolling at L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Brussels to study engraving and sculpture. In 1962 he returned to Paris to study with the renowned Italian sculptor Antoniuccio Volti (1915-1989), who became his mentor. In 1964, he began creating what would become his signature figure, the female nude. While keeping his studio in Paris, he moved to Tuscany a year later.

After important exhibitions in Italy and France at the end of the 1980s, the apex of Bonnefoit's career was reached in the 1990s with the increase of collective exhibitions, critical and public success and outstanding solo shows throughout the world. Major retrospectives of his oeuvre have been held at the Marino Marini Museum in Florence as well as at museums in Korea and Germany. His work can be found in the French Government and the City of Paris art collections, the Boccaccio Museum in Certaldo and the Kwan Ju Museum in Korea.