Christian BONNEFOI was born in 1948 in Salindres in the Gard.
He lives and works in Changy and Paris.
He obtained a doctorate in art history at the Sorbonne.
Heiress minimalism of the 1970s, the work of Christian Bonnefoi is defined as anti-representational, anti-fictional, anti-subjective, built in about a radical effect on disarticulation and re-articulation of the components of painting: surface level, frame, gesture, color, drawing.
"The picture is of value only if everything has been done to his loss" postulates Bonnefoi. It is for him to reformulate the "question of the table", that is to say the creation of a surface that allows the table to be. It is the possibility of "the appearance of the visible" that his whole strategy applies, and questioning this "enigma" that attaches by multiplying the modes of approach.
The trajectory of the work is built around the central axis of Babel, in a back-and-forth between constant silk paper work and that of tarlatan, all based on a common practice: the collage, which , destroying the unit of the surface, all manipulations. Tarlatan and tissue paper -both transparent, flexible, poreux- allow, by passing the adhesive, a whole series of impregnations and layering of the material of acrylic paint or graphite pencil or pastel path, which occur "blind" to the front or back or both.
All these processes and materials end up juxtaposing, intertwine and become more complex until either got a "puff" inextricable from the surface, which is in "picture". The work is so formed as much by what it hides than for what it reveals.
Pictorial issue of Christian Bonnefoi, which aroused the interest of early art historians as Yve-Alain Bois and Georges Didi-Huberman, before today mobilize the analysts images Jean Louis Schefer and Philippe-Alain Michaud, appears paradoxical.
Although conceptual and based on a "method." The embodiment controls the randomness of the final- result, his painting offers a great visual power. It falls like a "skin", the diaphanous, from the tiny to the minimum, or is saturated, excessive, gestural, almost baroque, it imposes the tactility of materials and energy of its tension effects. Contractions and expansions animate chaotic surfaces of his paintings command the serpentine shapes that intersect and are juxtaposed.
From 1977 to 1978 he was part of Ja pa na, group explicitly taking against the foot of Support / Surfaces.
In the most recent Ludo series, from 2000, painted tissue paper collages beyond the usual quadrangular framework to freely spread on the walls: the picture is without its frame. Undogmatic, experimentation remains for the artist Christian Bonnefoi an open game, a field of investigation still questioned.
Preferring a construction logic to that of deconstruction, the main concern of Bonnefoi is to produce a surface, object of the work. Gluing is a way for the artist to create the It uses large tissue paper glued edge to edge and thin strips of tartalane that intertwines and puts pressure on the support of the wall with pins and glue. This therefore results in voltage differences that produce a dialogue between the wall and the colored tissue paper.
