Review of Gallerina: Beatrice Bonino at Galerie Molitor, Berlin
émergent magazine, 2024
Read on émergent here.
The tones and textures of Beatrice Bonino’s Gallerina are imbued with tiredness – the faded, yellowing quality of things handled and used over and over. On the polished concrete floor of Molitor's basement gallery lie two low sculptures the dimensions of single mattresses, but resembling slabs of wax, each thinly made up with sheets of plastic, vinyl and paper in shades of off-white and resinous translucency. On the walls, a series of perspex vitrines display compositions of folded paper and cardboard in the same milky monochrome tones. The mood is uneasy and restrained, somewhere between domestic and clinical – the delicate arrangement of materials in tension with their worn, grubby-seeming appearance.
In a text for a previous exhibition, Bonino shared a selection of quotes and reflections, including notes on Moyra Davey’s Index Cards: ‘She writes longingly about transformation, the intangible thing that ‘makes a picture alive and not dead’... Remarkable constellations are no accident. It is the result of accretion.’ Bonino, too, seems invested in transformation through accretion — the kind of profound nuance reached only through careful repetition. In a number of the perspex vitrines at Molitor, a repeated form suggests a covert logic, a process of working through or towards something not necessarily articulable. Structures made from thin card and paper like a partially unfolded or refolded box are glued top-down by two flaps either side of them, their function as a container inverted, they become pure exterior.
The friend I was with remarked on a prominence of formalism in so many of the exhibitions he’s seen in the last 12 months: shows that you could of course write whole essays about but at the same time they are really just about form, he said, and I wondered if I could allow this exhibition to be about nothing more than the ‘how’ of these repeating folds – their subtle specificities – how paper folds, how plastic wrap folds, how a perspex edge folds, and so on.
In the writings of Deleuze, the concept of the fold offers a critique of typical accounts of subjectivity – those that presume a simple distinction between interiority and exteriority, appearance and essence, surface and depth. The Deleuzian fold assimilates these differences: for the fold announces that the inside is nothing more than a fold of the outside. I think again of Moyra Davey – the way she folds and tapes her photographic works to be mailed to their exhibition location without exterior packing, so that the creases and coloured tabs of tape become part of the final work. Through this process, utility is folded into aesthetic; they are both interior and exterior, container and contents. I read Davey’s methodology as closely connected to the anxieties she describes about how an image does or doesn’t become an artwork: that ‘intangible thing that makes a picture alive or dead’. It’s as though letting the photographs be just photographs might not be enough—so they have to become their own systems of display and circulation too, they have to make themselves useful.
An interplay between form and function runs similarly throughout Bonino’s sculptural practice, where boxes, vessels, plinths and chairs frequently test the boundaries between the uselessness of a work of art and a decorative object of use. Likewise, the figure of the gallerina summoned by the exhibition’s title is another instance where decoration and utility are folded into one another. Having worked a number of ‘gallerina’ jobs myself, the term recalls a faltering, flailing glamour. The gallerina must be the pretty face and dog’s body in one, the roles of secretary, technician, art-historian, cleaner and whatever else pressed into concertina continuity. She is like Tiqqun’s Young-Girl, an identity the French collective argues is not defined by age or gender, but is rather an ‘incorporation … prefabricated through mechanisms of marketing, control, and design within the audiovisual marketplace of information-identity exchange. More than a person, the gallerina is both an aesthetic and a function, a product of the art world’s dependency on cheap labour without compromising on optics.
I didn’t actually notice the exhibition’s title until checking the press text again after arriving home, and was at first surprised by it. But thinking back on Bonino’s works with this in mind, her varyingly wan tones of white, cream and grey attune to my memories of that low-waged, feminised work and its daily materialities: the pale translucence of bubble-wrapped paintings in dusty storage units, starchy tablecloths and the glaucous glow of a fridge stacked entirely with white wine; the sad beige of tupperware lunches eaten under storage room fluorescents; the endless polyfilling and sanding of pockmarks in white, white walls. There is of course some satisfaction to be found in those kinds of neat, menial tasks, and sometimes I did. But there is also boredom and exhaustion, and the most basic needs of a hungry, tired body can quickly come to feel ungainly and shameful under the scrutiny of bright white gallery lights. Like Bonino’s crypt-like beds with their limp plastic sheets, a gallery is not really designed to accommodate a living body. In this sense, her floor sculptures are like a sad mirage, arranging the white-grey-yellowing textures of the job (packing plastic, storage boxes, sweat-stains, nicotine) into a gallerina’s chief desire: a place to lie down, close her eyes, and sleep.
The last piece I looked at is really the first in the exhibition, though it’s somehow inconspicuous in its position facing the bottom of the stairs. It features a small striped cardboard box, unfolded to lie flat under a pane of glass and pinned to the wall by four screws. It’s unclear what the box originally contained, but on its lid is a printed image of a pink-red ribbon bow. The flattened box is set against a length of (I assumed) silk, the edges of which stick out to the left and right of the glass frame, echoing the paper flaps of the box-sculptures in the vitrines, and again gesturing towards a refusal (or inability) to hold, to contain. They transgress the frame’s function as a system of display.
The printed image of the ribbon on the box lid is the only—or at least the most direct—mode of representation in the exhibition. It brings to mind an essay by Lisa Robertson which speculates on the fate of a pink and silver ribbon once stolen by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Upon its discovery, Rousseau blamed a housemaid, accusing her of stealing it with the intention of seducing him. The episode is recounted in his Confessions, where he describes his enduring remorse and wonders what became of the maid after she was fired. In his memory she is “not only pretty, but [with] that freshness of color only to be found among the mountains, and above all, an air of modesty and sweetness, which made it impossible to see her without affection; she was besides a good girl, virtuous, and of such strict fidelity, that every one was surprised at hearing her named.”
Picturing this housemaid – compliant, pliable, and so rarely named – surrendering to the wrongful accusation, I think of another meaning of the word ‘fold’: to fail, to cease, to give in – and I wonder if Rousseau’s description isn’t the formula for the perfect gallerina.
