Debbie Bonello is well-known for her landscapes and seascapes, celebrating the grand designs of nature via the nuances and the moods of mostly uncontaminated natural spaces. The Gatherings exhibition shows Bonello exploring new territory, away from the peaceful and the untainted. She remarks that the necessity for change brought this about: “We change daily, we adapt, we progress and become different beings as we do.”
ForwardThis pursuit of new itineraries is the next chapter in Bonello’s artistic journey. Paradoxically, the pandemic was the catalyst for her to embark on a soul-searching exercise that instigated this change. This new body of work is an externalisation of emotions precipitated by a new reality.
“This pandemic affected us all in one way or another. Suddenly, I had to stop attending painting workshops, live classes and en-plein-air painting in groups. I had to redirect, and with many hours in my studio, I revisited past work. I came across a small painting I had done four years ago of immigrants in silhouette, walking on rough terrain, and it struck me,” Bonello exclaims.
She found parallels in the immigrants’ plight and the stifling restrictions of the first lockdown, as both conditions deal with navigating new terrain. The artist decided to investigate this concept and delve further to determine where this new adventure would take her.
Entry‘The theme found me’
“This theme found me. It was really an excuse to challenge my imagination and create situations on canvas where I could paint freely and use a range of hues along with bold expressive brushwork while developing a more abstract language. This theme is also a paradox of what we went through,” Bonello continues.
Crowds of people along the seashore, enjoying the carefree life of pre-pandemic holidaying at a time when it was safe to congregate, play around and enjoy the company of like-minded sun lovers, used to be one of Bonello’s signature themes. This effortless human interaction, in which long and fun summer days were second nature for most, was given a severe reality check.
Although people still thronged to the beaches last summer, the health authorities’ warnings lurked ominously and caution could not be disregarded. This spoilt the sport and severely curtailed the joy of abandon amid sea and sun. Any discarded cigarette butts or empty soft drink cans could harbour entire colonies of the godforsaken virus.
Life became more concentrated and less diluted in the sense that we all surrounded ourselves with family and a few close friends who mattered and almost had to let go of the rest
Cluster IIIn Gatherings, Bonello depicts small groups of people within murky, anonymous and undefined spaces in which the intrinsic chromatic characteristics are passed on to human manifestations lacking identity. One feels that this exhibition delivers a message of deterioration, an art historical documentation that contrasts and compares. Pieter Breugel, both father and son, captured the spirit of the Renaissance, a time in which lofty ideals and expectations were the domain of the intelligent, the ecclesiastic, the artistic and the noble. The crowds of insouciant villagers, very identifiable via their idiosyncratic facial phsyiognomies and body types, unselfconsciously danced and frolicked and made love, notwithstanding the dispiriting conditions of hardship, pestilence and death.
Although impressionism in the 19th century was more concerned with the ephemeral moment, Pierre August Renoir’s working-class Parisians dancing away in his 1876 masterpiece Bal du Moulin de la Galette demonstrates fun in crowds; the vivacious and social narrative was captured ever so vividly.
Cluster IVThe grim industrial gloom of the mid-20th century English northwest reverberates in L.S. Lowry’s urban landscapes, peopled by his signature match-stick human beings who lack individuality and who Lowry repeated incessantly across his canvases. Lowry’s world of people with match-stick limbs and volume-less torsos intentionally deprives his protagonists of identity and personal stories. They are all the same in the great scheme of things, as lifeless as the ‘naïve’ buildings that contain them.
‘A progressive regression’
Bonello’s collection of paintings accentuates this progressive epochal dehumanisation. She admits: “My take on crowds is more of an abstracted contemporary version of today. I wanted to keep my figures without identity because, in my mind, it reflects the uncertainly of these times while hoping for ‘gatherings’ to happen again. They are, in a way, reflecting a progressive regression, since the words are antonyms, and my work reflects gathering with a sense of isolation.”
BearersThis rather bleak perspective in relation to art history does not dampen Bonello’s innate positivity. She actually hopes that people would never lose their identity, their authenticity and their individuality. The surrender to a new dystopic reality, the lack of social events and interactions that highlighted life pre-pandemic precipitated feelings of nostalgia, particularly in those moments when she was all alone in her studio, contemplating on this distorted everyday existence that seemed to be having no end in sight and that prevented recalibration to some acceptable norm. “Life became more concentrated and less diluted in the sense that we all surrounded ourselves with family and a few close friends who mattered and almost had to let go of the rest. That chunk for me lost its identity and became a big, abstracted blur of distant, colourful memories which I tried to recreate and lock on canvas,” Bonello maintains.
Lockdowns and restrictions have made us more paranoid as the four walls of our homes provided a reclusive measure of safety, away from hugs, from the shaking of hands and from embraces. COVID-19 has brought us all together, not through actual social and physical interaction, but through the knowledge of a danger that could be lurking almost everywhere and from which no one knows who might be immune. An allergic sneeze could be read as dispersion of the virus and possible infection. Any innocent human endeavour could be the grim reaper disguised, bearing the menacing potential for pathogenic infection that could lead to an untimely death.
Bonello intended her two paintings Entry and Exit to be complementary as a comment, evoking comparisons with photographer Philip Lorca Dicorcia’s mid-1990s Streetwork series. “Entry and Exit bare just one individual in each; one facing away and the other towards the viewer. These two create a narrative between them, reflecting the people we let into our lives willingly and allow to become close to us and those we had to let go of,” Bonello observes dolefully.
Cluster VIIIThe pandemic, unreality and hope
Many famous photographers have tackled the theme of people’s behaviour in spaces outside of their homes. Dicorcia seized the moment of casual split-second encounters between absolute strangers on urban thoroughfares, who almost unconsciously occupy the same outdoor space for a microsecond; Thomas Struth documented casual gatherings in interior spaces like those of museums; Andreas Gursky captured crowds as swarms in very tight, claustrophobic compositions. Their work documents a safe pre-COVID mundane that now rings with nostalgia. COVID-19 has warped time and instilled in us a sense of craving for the immediate past, an emotion that in pre-pandemic normality would have struck us as misplaced as not enough water would have passed under the bridge for nostalgia to kick in.
Bonello reflects on this unreality: “Life as we knew it changed and I had to leave a chapter reflecting this in my body of work since my work is almost a pictorial diary. Fear, perhaps, was one subconscious emotional trigger, and that’s why people are painted in a group-like forms, without faces, almost forming shapes tightly tucked together.”
It feels like humanity has morphed into a new state of heightened, gorm-like consciousness. Bonello’s paintings are like cultures of bacilli in petri dishes, feeding off the agar jelly of their circumstances. Humanity has evolved into a stain, a strain of micro-organisms parasitically depleting the natural ecosystems. In the meantime, our existence has become anonymous, directionless, fearful and colourless and, at times, detached. Bonello has so eloquently portrayed this new anthropology. However, the artist insists that “fear is not something I’d like associated with my work, nor was it my intention to transmit it”.
“We have reduced our planet and stripped it off its resourcefulness and beauty in many ways, however I’m not the type to lose hope no matter how desperate a situation is. What are we without hope? Perhaps there is a parallelism with this current situation and my work. Simplifying the figures in this collection reflects a new way forward for me, where I let intuition guide me and take over as I plan and develop my compositions. That comes with practice and assertiveness, a direction I would like to continue to pursue and explore,” Bonello concludes.
Gatherings, curated by Art Sweven, is hosted by il-Kamra ta’ Fuq, Mqabba, and runs until June 15. Log on to the event’s Facebook page for opening times. Entrance is free but COVID-19 restrictions apply.