Bonnie Colin

Bonnie 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 path has followed rich and varied routes, from fashion to theater and interior decoration.

At 18, she joined Christian Dior, while continuing to attend evening classes at ENSB-A. At 20, she entered the École d’Art de la Glacière in Paris, in the Painting department.

At the same time, Bonnie secured various contracts with the Comédie-Française and the Opéra Garnier.

In 1996, at just 25, she met Christian Lacroix, who was then designing costumes for the production of Phèdre staged at the Comédie-Française.

She immediately fell in love with the creator’s exuberant universe, and in 2001 joined the Textile Design Studio of his prestigious Maison. Later, as an independent designer, she continued collaborating with Monsieur Lacroix until 2007.

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

Landscape Without Possession

Here, fluidity reigns. That of water, evoked in certain paintings. But even more so, the fluidity of paint and of the world that Bonnie Colin’s art brings into being: a world that does not belong to her, a world she does not seek to possess. Something flows, unstoppable, not even halted by the artist’s hand, which merely accompanies this flux—a perpetuum mobile, life itself.

It is so rare to encounter a landscape devoid of any trace of appropriation that one must begin by emphasizing this. Bonnie Colin does not paint her landscape: she does not attempt, through art, to make a viewed world her own. This implies neither distance nor indifference, but another way of taking pleasure, in the present moment of painting, in that fleeting and precarious encounter she calls landscape. An encounter to be begun again, at every moment, with every canvas, between loss and renewed grasp. One never bathes twice in the same landscape.

Her landscape is vertical, half mirror, half window. We do not see her in it, yet we sense at every moment, in every brushstroke, her gaze—without which this painting would not exist. For landscape is not nature in 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 may enter and through which one must at some point exit. As Heinrich von Kleist wrote in 1810 about The Monk by the Sea by Caspar David Friedrich, another landscape of fluidity: “One must have gone there and returned, though one would like to pass beyond, and that is impossible.”

It is this double movement, this back-and-forth without which art would be nothing more than a plunge into dreamed fusion, that gives this painting its extreme fluidity. Something is offered—vegetal, liquid—something escapes. Each painting feels like the same painting begun anew: similar, yet never identical. From one canvas to another, from one moment to another, the tonality shifts. Bonnie Colin paints light, even when she moves toward black. From one painting to the next, temporality changes. This art has its seasons. A cyclical time animates and runs through it: everything changes, everything returns, nothing changes. Fluidity is what binds—the living form of continuity.

It almost amounts to nothing, this nearly undone painting, where the brushstrokes meet just enough to still form a shape. Abstraction is there, at the edge of the landscape, like one step further into what the window reveals. It is about letting go, about stepping outside the Western dualism in which the mind always dominates the body. It is about moving, through painting as an act, toward a chosen dispossession of self and of the world.

And yet it also amounts to so much: these canvases that suddenly fill up, as if under the effect of some tide that will soon wash the surface clean, returning it to near nothingness. Dispossession is a lesson to be relearned again and again. Paradise is found and lost; the landscape has its dark side, at times rising tragically to the surface, at times receding to make way for the wonder of life unfolding, carried by that endless tide that moves through both the world and the one who paints it. One must have gone there and returned; one must know how to remain on the threshold, where such a landscape can be encountered—without appropriation.

— Pierre Wat