Solo show at D+T Project Gallery, Brussels, 17.3.2016 – 7.5.2016.
Through the photographic technique of the photogram, Sébastien Bonin develops a body of work that, at first glance, evokes the geometric patterning of Navajo textiles—their colors, repetitions, and structural logic. These motifs, however, are not sourced directly from traditional craft, but extracted from screenshots of Hollywood films, where they appear in diluted and decorative forms: rugs, blankets, costumes.
By working from these mediated images, Bonin addresses the mechanisms of American soft power and cultural appropriation. The Navajo patterns, originally embedded in a specific cultural, symbolic, and artisanal context, are here flattened, stylized, and endlessly reproduced as aesthetic surfaces. Detached from their origin, they circulate as visual clichés—absorbed into a globalized image economy that both consumes and neutralizes their meaning.
This process of translation and loss is mirrored in the artist's own technique. Bonin employs a self-developed photogram method using colored cinematic filters and hand-painted transparent celluloid sheets. These elements are projected in a darkroom onto photosensitive paper, using a contact-based exposure system. The resulting images are not captured but constructed through layers of light, color, and obstruction—echoing the way cultural forms are filtered, transformed, and recontextualized.
The final compositions, meticulously hand-cut and framed in raw, untreated brass, subtly reference the material language of Navajo jewelry, while maintaining a tension between homage and displacement.
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