Beatrice Bonino

For her first exhibition at Galerie Molitor, Beatrice Bonino (*Turin, 1992) continues to develop her idiosyncratic visual language in a group of sculptures. Subtle acts of compression and juxtaposition transform old materials—boxes, plastic, vinyl, curtains—into something else. Bonino mines the tension between softness and a hard edge, responding to and seeking that moment when objects give pause. Formally, however, her constellations derive their ineffable quality from slight variations in tone and texture, rather than more marked contrast. As she moves between accentuating and destabilizing the act of containing, she observes the proximity of boxes and beds. Bonino also conceived of these beds in reference to the flat, often embellished stone or marble graves that adorn church walls and floors with the shape of the body of the saints they contain. Bonino imagines an abstraction of a bed—or an upside down box—in her two largest sculptures to date. Marx’s insistence on the interdependence between the abstract and the concrete could be informative, as the architect Pier Vittorio Aureli summarizes: “Abstractions are thus for Marx not an a priori category but the end result of analyzing the concrete, even though they are the starting point for any attempt to give a precise representation of the world. As such, abstractions dissolve the traditional antinomy between the concrete and the abstract, the tangible and the intangible, since abstractions are concrete.”