In Sébastien Bonin’s latest solo exhibition, La Mantecatura is Savoie — the missing link in the artist’s body of work. This mountainous French region bordering Italy embodies a part of the artist’s identity and family heritage, from which he draws to give his personal experience a universal resonance. In Bonin’s artistic universe, the mountain and rural life connect identities, eras, and techniques, nurturing and shaping his work.
In painting, Sébastien Bonin is above all drawn to the assemblage of colors, composition, and framing. Here, he presents his own distinctive cutouts, combining three-dimensional and two-dimensional elements to create a layered exhibition — both spatially and in terms of meaning.
The works first reveal a play of dichotomies that establishes a constant tension between the personal and the universal, the ancestral and the contemporary, the handcrafted and the manufactured, the fundamental and the anecdotal, the timeless and the fleeting — all elevated by the evocation of mountain life.
Then comes the elevation of everyday agricultural tools and objects — such as the blueberry comb or the water channel — to the rank of sculpture, by reproducing them through modern techniques or altering their structure until they lose all functionality, as with the pair of clogs or the bells. This artistic gesture speaks to the curiosity and drive with which Bonin approaches the world and its transformations. The works carry a sense of nostalgia, where contemporaneity replaces the patina of time.
Ultimately, what strikes most in Mantecatura is the central place given to memory. Sébastien Bonin’s work resembles a quest that is both intimate and collective. Through his creations, he brings to light those seemingly trivial elements that shape us — individually and as a society.
The result is a narrative that is deeply personal yet universal, carried by Bonin’s ability to reveal, beneath the surface of the everyday, an entire memory — that of rural life, of the Alps, and of himself. With this exhibition, the artist invites us to dive into the heart of his childhood, which becomes a mirror for our own relationship to the past, to place, and to the objects that connect us.
Perhaps that is what la mantecatura ultimately represents — a binding agent between the intimate and the collective, that tension between two worlds that gives our memories their particular flavor. And there, at that point of fusion, we reach the very core of Sébastien Bonin’s artistic practice: images that speak of the world, oscillating between personal reminiscence and social reflection.