.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
At once tragic and comic, The Tear is a bold early example of Louise Bonnet’s surreal portraits. Painted in 2016, it forms part of the celebrated series of tennis players that propelled her to public acclaim. Against a rich monochrome backdrop, Bonnet’s subject stands in crisp profile. A single hooded eye is trained upon the levitated ball before him, whose radiant green surface seems to illuminate the space around it. His wildly exaggerated nose—a hallmark of the artist’s practice—mirrors not only the ball’s engraved pattern, but also the shape of the titular teardrop that rolls in glassy perfection down his cheek. Every element of the composition—from the wrinkles of the character’s bandana, to the shadows that play across his face and shirt—is rendered with precise, graphic clarity. Rooted in close engagement with art history, film and comics, Bonnet’s caricatured muses express real emotions and psychological states, highlighting the anguish and absurdity of the human condition. Part clown, part athlete, the present work’s protagonist refuses to return our gaze, quietly begging for empathy.
Bonnet has risen to critical acclaim over the past decade, notably exhibiting in last year’s Venice Biennale. Born in Geneva, she studied at the Haute École d’art et de design, before relocating to Los Angeles in 1994. Following a career in illustration and graphic design, she began exhibiting in 2008, ultimately arriving at her signature style after switching from acrylic to oil paint in 2014. Her characters are plucked from her imagination, informed by sources ranging from Pablo Picasso and medieval portraits, to classic horror films and the work of American cartoonist Robert Crumb. The tennis players, she explains, sprung solely from a fascination with uniform: their starched white outfits not only slipped seamlessly into her crisp, hyper-real aesthetic, but also fought humorously with her subjects’ inflated, out-of-control features. Ultimately, however, Bonnet seeks to confer a sense of dignity upon her characters. In The Tear, her grotesque, melancholic wit is offset by deft, cinematic chiaroscuro, precise volumetric modelling and highly-polished draughtsmanship. Beauty and ugliness are held in scintillating tension, frozen—like the tennis ball—in Bonnet’s strange parallel universe.
Bonnet has risen to critical acclaim over the past decade, notably exhibiting in last year’s Venice Biennale. Born in Geneva, she studied at the Haute École d’art et de design, before relocating to Los Angeles in 1994. Following a career in illustration and graphic design, she began exhibiting in 2008, ultimately arriving at her signature style after switching from acrylic to oil paint in 2014. Her characters are plucked from her imagination, informed by sources ranging from Pablo Picasso and medieval portraits, to classic horror films and the work of American cartoonist Robert Crumb. The tennis players, she explains, sprung solely from a fascination with uniform: their starched white outfits not only slipped seamlessly into her crisp, hyper-real aesthetic, but also fought humorously with her subjects’ inflated, out-of-control features. Ultimately, however, Bonnet seeks to confer a sense of dignity upon her characters. In The Tear, her grotesque, melancholic wit is offset by deft, cinematic chiaroscuro, precise volumetric modelling and highly-polished draughtsmanship. Beauty and ugliness are held in scintillating tension, frozen—like the tennis ball—in Bonnet’s strange parallel universe.