It is easy to fixate on the material aspects of Beatrice Bonino’s work: silicone, plastics, paper, and cardboard, packaging boxes, and silks that conceal or frame other artificial materials, found and made objects— such as ribbons, bows, and garments—or less resistant matter such as roses, lipstick, and foil-wrapped chocolate.

Bonino drops clues about what these assemblages might be, where they come from, in her titles that are unhesitating as they are mystifying, perfect even, but we will never know to our satisfaction what is going on.

One of her recurring registers is memory, another is value. A sentence in the text written for her solo exhibition Cosetta at MMXX in Milan is a compendious description of what she performs on objects: “The materials chosen from so many seemingly similar ones, now look the rarest to us.”

She will say that what she does mostly is to subtract. And that the word pre-aesthetic best applies to her works.

One could say they are time machines transporting you to other times—but there is a continual slippage for the viewer of these sculptures that refashion neglected and everyday stuff, between the past and this moment.

In the end, they float free from the real, they sweep into the room and blow us away.

“A picture held us captive, and we cannot get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.”


Notes:

The title of the exhibition is borrowed from Aveek Sen’s introductory essay to Moyra Davey’s Les Godesses/Hemlock Forrest, published by Dancing Foxes and Bergen Kunsthall, 2017. Davey, in turn, uses it as a title for an essay in her Index Cards, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020, and she quotes Sen: “….the fear of the low-hanging fruit, and the fear of the opposite of low-hanging fruit; between risking what is too easy and risking what is too difficult; between getting something too effortlessly and losing something through too much effort; between immediate access and the denial of access.”

Reena's eyes are brown? Blue? Something like that. Why describe her as beautiful? She's not. She's pre-aesthetic.…….How is she? Young and ugly and beautiful. All-in-one vehicle. (Bernadette Corporation, Reena Spaulings, A Novel, Semiotext(e) Native Agents Series, 2004, p.3)

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953), Philosophical Investigations, Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, 4th ed., Harvard University Press, 2009, section 115, p.194.

Bio

Beatrice Bonino (b. 1992, Turin) is an artist living between Paris and Turin. She holds a PhD in Sanskrit from Paris Sorbonne. Recent solo exhibitions include:
Drinking the language of things, Teatro Grottesco, Turin (2025); Gallerina, Galerie Molitor, Berlin; Cosetta, Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn; Kill your darlings, Ermes,Ermes, Rome (2024); Cosetta, MMXX, Milan; If I did, I did, I die, Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery, New York. Recent group exhibitions include: 11 Parthenon, Nicosia; Ten thousand ugly inkblots, Schiefe Zaehne, Berlin (2025); and Post Scriptum, curated by Luca Lo Pinto, MACRO, Rome (2024). Forthcoming in the fall of 2025 is a solo exhibition in conversation with artists selected by Beatrice Bonino, co-curated with Catherine David, at Fondation Pernod Ricard, Paris.

With thanks to Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Atene.

Beatrice Bonino's exhibition will open in our new temporary location, a magnificent Grade I Historic Monument at 3 Tositsa Street in Exarcheia, just steps from the Archaeological and Epigraphic Museums of Athens.

A work by Beatrice Bonino will also be on view at the Radio Athènes HQ, at 15 Petraki Street.