Enter to The Eel It’s like entering a womb. The atmosphere is dark, the tinted windows and the sound of heartbeats create the perfect scene. The lack of light inevitably pushes towards the spotlights that illuminate a wall where paintings of twenty fetuses hang. Many are already dead. The rest will not survive.
They are deformed, inert, blurred. Small pinkish spots on a dark background that will never see the light. And in front of them is the painter Paula Bonet. These fetuses are the first paintings seen in this exhibition that addresses violence, perinatal death and the consequences of everything that patriarchy has done with women’s bodies. But it also addresses light and healing.
This exhibition shares a name and a good part of the works with the one that Bonet already presented in 2021 in Valencia. But the one that can be seen until February 12 at the Can Framis museum in Barcelona is different. It is a revision of his previous work. But the important thing is not the new paintings, but what motivates them.
“I am not doing this review for pleasure,” says Bonet. He explains that after the first Eel she felt trapped. “It had never happened to me before, but I wasn’t inspired. I had ideas, but I couldn’t work on them,” he remembers. There he realized that he had not closed a stage or healed wounds, as he thought.
And this exhibition is based on two miscarriages of the author and delves into the “invisible violence”: those of language, those of love relationships or family relationships. It is a cry that gives voice to all “the messages that victims send and that society has not been able to see.” It was something Bonet needed to explain, but his first exposure did not have the cathartic effect he thought it would.
“I did it out of fear,” he says today. “I entered that project from a place I had not inhabited before.” Bonet is characterized by his free strokes, apparently anarchic although, in reality, they have a meaning and connection. But the first version of The Eel It was done from “absolute respect for the work and the content. And respect turned into fear,” he explains.
“Normally, I paint and go into the unknown. And, when I finish, I try to understand it. But in the first presentation, I theorized excessively. That was a mistake, because I was pursuing the romantic idea of disappearing in the work. And that struck me down,” he says. It became so hidden that it renounced one of its characteristic features: the portrait.
Bonet paints from “freedom and pleasure” and where he finds these sensations most is in portraits, especially large format ones. And those have reappeared in this new version of The Eel, where faces are exhibited that recover the pictorial essence of the author and that have come to replace various pieces that have been discarded from the first exhibition.
Bonet does not deny his previous work, but many works – such as the fetuses – remain. The point is that the new ones dialogue with the old ones, embracing the pain that motivated them and taking it to a more serene place. And, above all, giving it weight and putting it in its rightful place. Literally.
There are pieces that are not even hanging on the walls. One of the series that remains is that of flaccid penises, located in the space dedicated to violence. A dozen paintings of meaningless virile members from whom Bonet has completely taken away their power, leaving them on the ground.
“This part originally occupied two spaces, but in this version I decided to leave it only one. So I had to think carefully about how I placed these paintings. They are always placed on the floor to visualize how they will look and how you will arrange them, but I never hung these… And, finally I understood that I had to leave them like this,” says Bonet.
According to the author, this arrangement was liberating for her, but it caused some discomfort in the museum. So much so that they had to add a section to the contract stating that the room would not have any responsibility in case any work was broken. “I would think it would be good if someone touched one of these paintings or kicked it,” she says, while she herself dismantles one with her foot.
“I have never felt too attached to my pieces. I don’t care what happens to them and there are none that I want to keep,” he adds. In fact, there are some of the paintings in this exhibition – among them, the penises – that are going to disappear.
This is because Bonet chose an unorthodox technique that is based on putting acrylic on top of the oil and not the other way around, which results in the piece cracking over time and becoming unrecognizable. “They don’t have many years left,” he says, looking at those works.
The power of letting go
In this version of The Eel, Bonet lets go. Let go of the pain, fear and guilt. But also parts of her past as a painter. In the room of violence you can hear and read phrases from his novel of the same name. For the audio, she recorded herself with her voice slightly distorted. For the letters, he chose a typography that is reminiscent of the period that became most viral, the one he dedicated to portraits. naivewith vivid colors and feminist messages with that same typography.
It is a stage that Bonet has wanted to leave behind for a long time. “When something is so well received, what are you left with? It can devour you,” says the painter. And precisely for this reason it has given space to that old phase, “because it is going to stay here,” he says.
What will also be left behind is the fear with which the painter approached the process in the first instance, which led her to give much more weight to the dark part of what she wanted to tell. And it is that The Eel It is a journey “from hell to paradise” and in this review light has much more importance.
It is in the last of the rooms where the work of the new exhibition is truly seen: there is a large luminous and impulsive “spot” that dialogues with the darkness of the beginning. In addition, there are also the two portraits that give meaning to the new exhibition. One of them is under construction and you can only see that it shows someone’s face when you get closer and look closely. The other is clearer but at the same time ambiguous.
They represent two important girls for Paula Bonet. One is her stepdaughter and the other is ‘Júlia’, the only painting that has a title and which is a figuration of what her unborn daughter could have been like. “It is now when I look into the eyes of the eel, when I present it without my voice shaking and when I can say that this, perhaps, would have been the daughter I would have had, when I know that the process is closed,” says the painter, proudly looking at her work.
This exhibition is a “reconciliation” with motherhood and loss. Bonet explains that, during the first version of The Eel She understood that, despite the mourning, she did not want to be a mother. But that did not alleviate his pain or prevent him from having a “childish” reaction and seeking answers and blame where there were none.
And it wasn’t until he reviewed his work and allowed himself to return to the place where it all began that he was able to find closure. “Many times the work moves ahead of you and gives you answers. The problem is that you often don’t realize it and you have to let time pass.”
That’s what Bonet did. After two years during which he tried to get rid of the eel, he has returned to his nest. “Now I do feel free and at peace. I have closed a stage that was not only artistic, but was a personal rapture,” he reflects.
Now, she says, she feels ready to move forward. There are still a few weeks left in this version of The Eel and Bonet admits that she feels “tired” of having to continue explaining and talking about this work and topics to which she no longer wants to dedicate “neither time nor energy.” But she won’t have to do it for long, since in March she will be ready to present her new project.
He does not want to give details about what he is up to, but he does make it clear that he has had quite a bit of autobiography for the moment. “I want to speak from a new place and give myself again to painting. “The one that demands both those who paint it and those who look at it,” he assures, promising a work in which Paula Bonet can once again be seen at her best.
#Paula #Bonet #returns #Anguila #exercise #reconciliation #returned #painting #pleasure #freedom
