UPCOMING EXHIBITION :
"Salon ARLéman", 14 to 16 of March 2025, Thonon-les-Bains, Espace des Ursules​
About the artist
Estelle Bonenfan is a Franco-Polish artist born in Lyon, France, the 15th July 1997. She’s the daughter of a polish artist, Janka, and so has always been immersed in art, a world full of piled up canvas, oil scent, and dreams.
She grew up in Thonon-les-Bains, a town by the Lake of Geneva, and passed most of her summers in Poland. There, as a child, Estelle used to write poems, imagine stories, and sculpt sandstones.
When she went to study architecture in Lyon, she learn something that only a distored quill and Indian Ink could teach her. While drawing the city, she met the beauty of unexpected imperfections, and realized the difference between well done geometry and intuitive expression. She also learn how to do less, only to express more. Then she seriously began artwork and paintings at the age of 19, and have already started to exhib her work.
After getting her bachelor’s degree, she spend an Erasmus year in Genoa, Italy, and make researches on the prehistoric emergence of art and architecture for her master’s thesis.
ABOUT ARTWORK
An important theme of her artwork, is her fascination for heavy, wild and calm animals, especially horses. Another theme, is the metaphysical questions around life and death, existence and imagination. All of those regards come painted like a window on another reality : with much saturated colours, by way of an emotional onirism, often hold in a photographic composition.
Her characters are most of the time whitened, disproportioned, with faltering contours, and big underlined eye sockets. What seems to refers only to death, tell above all about what is hidden inside, and revealed at the end, or simply in front of wide open eyes : pure feeling.
Her travels in Italy and South America gave her new sources of inspiration which she explores through combinations of colors, materials and subjects.
Paintings with a dedicated music
Estelle Bonenfan learned classical piano for 7 years before starting impro, which permits her today to escape, find release and inspiration. In music, you don’t play all notes at the same time, and not the same way either : there is kind of a colour, kind of a story, a balanced harmony.
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Some of the artworks are connected to a unique piano improvisation expressing the feeling beneath the colours. An improvisation that cannot even be played a second time by Estelle.
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Spirits of Satchila are about the invisible monsters that guards tiny fragile things.
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Dorian Grey is about the storm that takes it all away, with passion, despair and beauty. About the absurd existence of life. About our will to have it all and never stop to dance, and never letting it go. Running without even knowing why and where we go.
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The metaphysician is about unrealistic things that suddenly appears as a magical strange yet simple and strong truth hidden beneath the surface.
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The Night Carousel is about the resonance of childhood, of believing in the life of unanimated things. About nostalgy and about the wheel of time that keeps turning and turning around like a shiny carousel.
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Travel beyond the end of the world comes with the best emotional music interpretation of the sixt. It is about believing in the beyond, fearless. Maybe a little bit about for ever love. About a light flowing path, and about the poetry of the moments that never ends for the ones who look beyond.
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Manouré is about unexpected natural and simple love. May it be for a friend or a lover. About the peaceful feeling you have whatching the sunset when you know you're not really alone, even when you physically seem to be.