Sébastien Bonin

Objects exist. They were made for specific purposes, by specific people, in specific places. That is not a romantic observation. It is a fact. A chimney draws smoke. A comb harvests berries. A corn dryer preserves grain through winter. These objects work. They are efficient. They are the result of a long process of refinement that has nothing to do with decoration and everything to do with necessity.

I am interested in what happens when you remove an object from that necessity. Not to celebrate it. Not to mourn it. To see what is actually there. Most of what is called craft or vernacular tradition is not seen clearly. It is covered over with sentiment or ignored entirely. Neither response is useful.

My work takes objects — from Alpine peasant culture, from indigenous traditions, from the anonymous architecture of rural communities — and reproduces them in different materials. The change of material is not symbolic. It is a way of looking more carefully. When something familiar is made unfamiliar, you have to look at it again. That is the point.

Painting works differently. A figure carrying a load of hay is not a symbol of rural labor. It is a specific posture, a specific weight, a specific relationship between a body and the world it operates in. Paint can hold that specificity. It can also hold light, and duration, and the particular quality of a landscape that exists nowhere except where it actually is.

Traditional knowledge does not disappear because it is obsolete. It disappears because no one is paying attention. Some of it is irreplaceable. The machine does not do the same thing. It does something faster and cheaper, which is not the same thing. I think this distinction matters. My work proceeds from the assumption that it does.