EXHIBITION OF BEATRICE BONINO WITH WORKS BY LUTZ BACHER, JEAN-PIERRE BERTRAND, MATT BROWNING, GIANNI COLOMBO, GIUSEPPE DESIATO, MARISA MERZ, DIETER ROTH AND GIORGOS TIGKAS
NOVEMBER 11, 2025 - JANUARY 31, 2026
FONDATION PERNOD RICARD, PARIS
I am moving through a generous bright room; cream colored, well kept. A long window wall faces outside toward a quiet terrace, allowing the daylight to seep into the room, where it mixes with the warm, diffused gallery lighting creating an effect as if the space is eternally suspended in the moment just before the sun breaks through the clouds.
It's all so nice and pleasant. – these are the words that circle through my mind as I walk through the gallery. The materials are easily recognizable as belonging to the family of trash, dirt, and debris. But calling the assemblages on show dirty would feel wrong. They carry a sense of historicness. This dirt is important dirt, somehow rendered desirable. The objects seem like artefacts, or talismans. Religious objects dug from the sacred ground of an excavation site. Most of them are kept in glossy cases made from acrylic glass or in boxes made from thinner, foldable plastic, like the ones used for packaging chocolates, dress shirts, underwear, sewing kits, make up products. I think: the work doesn’t want to be accessed too immediately. Although flaunting its yellowed allure made up of appealing textures and consumerism aesthetics, it wants to be left alone.
The objects are defunct, smushed, wilted, brittle, left behind, a little pathetic. Their fragility is so evident. Whoever excavated them and put them here felt they deserved to be protected — from oblivion, from foreign impact, and from the wrong kind of dust. I think: even looking too hard might wear a hole into the delicate fabrics; leave a dent in the antique plastic of shopping bags.
This room makes me feel like I could be one of the precious objects on display: slightly disheveled by my early morning four hour Flixbus connection from Brussels to Paris and the rushed metro ride that followed, now finding myself in a neat box. It really feels like time stopped when I entered.
In a few cases a greasy looking paper replaces the institutional acrylic. It is thumb-tacked over the objects, which feels a little more relaxed. A black silhouette of a tiny long sleeve shirt (it's adult human sized, but I mean tiny in the way that Audrey Hepburn or a ballet teacher are - precise, chíc women), with one slim sleeve extended outward. Voilà. I can't tell if it's the front or back of the shirt facing me. The greasy paper blurs its dark contours too much, but the clothing label that has been retrospectively attached with transparent tape on the nape of the neck convinces me that it's backwards. We’re facing in the same direction.
As I make my slow progress across the room, another group of sculptures draws my attention. They are mounted directly to the wall – no case or frame. Their shapes and placements seem like a response to my body. From afar, they make me think of white muslin, often used to make sewing patterns, maybe padded I think. As I approach, the soft, malleable fabric turns into something hard and brittle. Sewing patterns for protective wear; aprons, and visors made out of plasterboard or something similar. Other than the others, these objects almost invite me to lean on them, like the cushions of metros and buses or doctor’s offices. Infrastructure guiding my limbs into the right positions.
In the second room, two tiny knitted shoes greet me. I squat down next to them so they’re level with my eyes, suspended in awe. They look like little beached boats, woven out of fishing rod the color of the sea. Piercing the porous fabric in multiple places are thin, rusty nails. I think of a shipwreck, the force of nature, and I think about the small feet that would fit these little malleable shoes. They make me consider fragility again, but in a different way. The patheticness of something so small and defunct touching shoulders with the braveness of transgressing boundaries, of exposing oneself to the world and its forces.
There is an unexpected glance into the adjoining gare Saint-Lazare through a window in the back-wall of the space. The glass of the window panes warps like a magnifying glass, enforcing the feeling that I’m looking at a world separate from mine. Some trains are resting on siding tracks, looking like ancient sea creatures under the blue light that seeps through the dirtied glass roof of the station building. I notice the dust and grime that coats everything like a second skin. I pass another visitor. So far I haven’t payed any attention to the few people moving though the space with me, but she smells like the delicate strips of paper that I burn folded into small harmonicas in my room from time to time. The burnt remains inside the small three-legged silver bowl beautifully preserve the shape of the paper folds, then transformed into something softer.
Although nothing in this show is allowed to touch the infrastructure – not the floor, not the walls, not directly at least – I notice the subtle alignment of a plinth with one of the floor’s arbitrary fugues and some wall mounted pieces, thickly layered silk ribbons encased in long and narrow squished paper boxes, seem to adopt the formality of the space’s built-in cabinets, the doors of which slightly stick out.
At the far end of the room the radio silence of a Cathode Ray Tube (which is what you call the old clunky box TVs of the 90s and 2000s) flickers away. The ghostly atmosphere of the unmoving long shot of a pale city scape draws me in. The video has no sound, but its screaming silence is extremely visual. Apart from an angular silhouette of a building on the bottom left corner I can’t make out much. Blending with the flicker of the old screen is a whirling snow storm, thickening the air. I imagine the eeriness of the empty streets, but also the cosiness of being snowed in, having nowhere to be. I think about the slow disappearance of snow from my winters over the years, how the pureness of snow seems to have the power of making everything new again. As I watch, two more outlines emerge. They seem hesitant to reveal themselves. In the far back, almost the same color as the snow, loom the two narrow silhouettes of the World Trade Center. I am touched. They look so faint. I think: the snow is our forgetting, the craziness and velocity with which we move today — the towers are wholesomeness, and a lost assuredness that everything is going to be okay.
On my way out I revisit a piece that I spent some time looking at earlier. Still adjusting to the tonality of the show I had been drawn to it aesthetically. Its milky yellow plastic, this parchment-like quality. Some gold and silver traces caught on transparent tape attached to the handles. The ceiling lights reflected in the casing making it hard for my eyes to focus. A sleeping beauty. Now I see: A thin plastic bag in an acrylic case just big enough for it to stand up in. Its body of emptiness seems suspended in expansion, reaching for the walls of its confinement, almost reaching. A deep inhale, the body inflating itself, almost there, ready to wake up, to burst its glass coffin. Maybe all the containers aren’t here to prop up the works after all. Maybe their function is to stop them from spilling their uncontrollable wisdom across the neat terrazzo floor.
In the Main in the More was open from 18.11.2025 to 31.01.2026 at Fondation Pernod Ricard
Works mentioned:
Beatrice Bonino’s Funny and Fun, But should something else be made sacred, Neon (Sentence)s, Gonnas, The Carrier Bag
Marisa Merz’ Untitled (One of a few pairs of shoes made in the 1960s. She would wear these Scarpette from time to time, not meant as a performance but to affirm the continuity between the creative act and daily life.)
Lutz Bacher’s film Snow
Anna Lorbeer