Bonnie Colin

Colin was born in 1971 in Longwy.

She left Paris for the Angers region where she has lived and worked since 2011.

Bonnie Colin’s atypical artistic journey has taken rich and varied paths, from fashion to theater via decoration.

She joined Christian Dior at 18 years old and continued diligently attending evening classes at ENSB-A. At 20 years old she joined l’École d’Art de la Glacière à Paris, in the painting section.

Bonnie simultaneously landed different contracts at the Comédie Française and the Opéra Garnier.

In 1996, at just 25 years old, she met Christian Lacroix, then a costume designer, during the creation of the play Phèdre staged «au Français».

She immediately fell in love with the abundant universe of the designer and in 2001, she joined the Textile Design Studio of this great House. Then, as a freelancer, she continued this collaboration with Monsieur Lacroix until 2007.  

She also created textile designs for Cacharel, Sonia Rykiel, Chacok, and even Guilty Brotherhood in New York.

Landscape Without Possession

Here reigns fluidity. That of water, evoked by certain paintings. But even more so, that of painting itself and of the world born from Bonnie Colin’s art: a world that does not belong to her, a world she does not seek to possess. Something fluid flows, uninterrupted, not even by the artist’s hand, which merely accompanies this flux—an endless motion, life itself.

It is so rare to encounter a landscape devoid of any trace of appropriation that it must first be acknowledged. Bonnie Colin does not paint her landscape; she does not attempt, through art, to claim as her own a world she observes. This, however, does not imply distance or indifference but rather a different way of experiencing—through the present moment of painting—this fleeting and fragile encounter she calls landscape. A meeting that must be renewed at every instant, with each painting, between loss and newfound grasp. One never bathes in the same landscape twice.

Bonnie Colin’s landscape is vertical, half-mirror, half-window. She does not appear in it, yet at every moment, in every brushstroke, her gaze is perceptible: a way of seeing and feeling without which this painting would not exist. For a landscape is not nature itself; it is nature as experienced by the one who confronts it. Colin, clearly, experiences it as an opening—a window, as I said—through which one can enter and from which, inevitably, one must at some point emerge. As Heinrich von Kleist wrote in 1810 about The Monk by the Sea by Caspar David Friedrich, another landscape of fluidity: "But one must have gone there and come back, while longing to cross over, knowing it is impossible." It is this double movement, this back-and-forth without which art would be nothing more than a plunge into a dream of fusion, that gives this painting its extreme fluidity. Something is given—vegetal, liquid—something escapes. Each painting is like the same painting begun anew: similar, yet never the same. From one painting to the next, from one moment to another, the tone shifts. Bonnie Colin paints light, even when moving toward darkness. From one painting to another, temporality shifts. This art has its own seasons. A cyclical time animates and traverses it: everything changes, everything returns, nothing changes. Fluidity is what binds—a living form of continuity.

It holds by almost nothing, this painting, nearly unmade at times, where brushstrokes meet just enough to still create form. Abstraction lingers at the edge of the landscape, a step further into what the window reveals. It is about letting go, escaping the Western dualism in which the mind always holds dominion over the body. It is about moving, through painting as an act, toward a chosen relinquishment of both self and world.

And yet, it also holds by so much, these paintings that suddenly fill, as if by some unknown tide that will soon wash the canvas anew, returning it to almost nothing. This relinquishment is a lesson that must be learned and relearned. Paradise is both found and lost; the landscape has its dark side—at times surfacing, tragic, at times receding, giving way to the wonder of life that blossoms, carried by the endless tide that moves through the world and through the one who paints it. But one must have gone there and come back; one must know how to stand at the threshold, where such a landscape is encountered, free from possession.

—Pierre Wat