Artist: Paul Bonnet
Exhibition title: Trespass
Venue: Les Bains-Douches, Alençon, France
Date: September 6 – November 17, 2024
Photography: Michaël Quemener / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Les Bains-Douches, Alençon
There, waiting to take its shape, with all the moss and the stones around you. Pale and thin and tip-toeing through the grass with rotten apple and the mushroom all about you. In the rivers of thin cement, too loose to start setting, you turn in half-rotation, and look around you. Pale shapes of snakes lay whistling in coils that are lighting up the space behind you. And there, to the very right of you, some pebbles kept moving away, turning in half-rotation until they were ground down to powder. The pale apple-yellowed pebbles that were once solid and still, made a soft kind of sand that was blown by the wind all around you. There, on bridges of wood stretched over bodies of water, bushes parted slowly to reveal the shadow of their underside, and the hidden faces that called it home. Pale lime and cherry in broken circles that flashed like lightning. trapping rabbits and the travellers who came to be around them. There, stepping through the roots that twist in the soil it stood, supporting a city and its people now before you. Pale and unable to face the sun, they gazed down in pairs at the rabbit skin ash the wind brushed around you. There, in the unbroken circles of bone on the sand, ringed by trees and leaves and chestnuts, pale skintight paratroopers gaze down on their maps, so they might softly land on the ground around you. And on the wooden painted bridge, quietly tip-toeing through the moonlight above you, pale unbroken shells that crack under foot, cutting the canvas sails of each boat that floats around you. There, seen through windows at sea, the partial head of flower and moss and weed. Pale and closed so as not to gather the sand and dust and dirt falling down on you. You stand, in the presence of ash and limestone rock, and turn to look around you. Pale and hidden away on the back of old maps, they scale the timber and brick before you. Pale and silent and without shape they trespass, quite unseen in the landscape that shall forever hold you.
