Louise Bonnet’s painting figures inhabit eerie landscapes with exaggerated and bloated proportions and grotesque, distorted features. The Swiss artist draws inspiration from Old Master paintings, Surrealism and underground comix to explore themes of melancholy, loneliness and nostalgia. We asked Bonnet about her fantasy ‘Perfect Day’, which involves French cuisine, George Harrison and plenty of cigarettes.
Let’s just say that it starts in 2015, and from there, we go on to another timeline than this one. I wake up at 7:00 am, rested and full of energy, something that has never, ever happened to me in my whole life. My cousin, who has the same problem, has a theory about it being due to low blood pressure. Who knows. Anyway, I feel so great, I run three miles and I can stop in the middle to smoke cigarettes and it only makes me feel better.
I have a coffee and half a pack of Camel Lights. I then go to my studio to paint and I find the work I did the day before looks amazing. I am not stressed or worried in the least and start working right away, without my OCD procrastination routine, since everything is going perfectly. No one calls or comes by or even talks to me for hours and hours and the Frank Sinatra biography audiobook Frank by Kitty Kelley – who clearly hates him – is new to me.
When the doorbell rings at some point, it’s the person who has been keeping all of George Harrison’s clothes, and they think I should just have them all. We do not linger on why this would be happening and why I am the same size as George.
By now it’s close to Happy Hour and I meet my old friends who still live in Switzerland and we smoke and drink cocktails and Chablis. I am wearing one of George’s Nepalese goat fur coats.
All the artists I love and admire are at this café as well and feel comfortable enough to recount their most humiliating and embarrassing stories but also life-changing painting tricks, like you only use four colours and that’s all. It would be pretty easy because I know none of these tricks. We all smoke a lot.
I go home and hug my kids and husband who thankfully still think I am doing a fantastic job at being a wife and mother, even though I have basically only been smoking and wearing fur coats and pointy boots all day. We order steak frites that come perfectly cooked.
We all watch The Office, we talk, laugh, we go to bed.
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Erwin Wurm’s Perfect Day: “I’d ask Piero Manzoni if it’s really his crap in the can”
Watch: a morning with Urs Fischer in Paris
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Jenny Saville: up, down and back under the spell
