BONA DE MANDIARGUES AT ALISON JACQUES

Alison Jacques’ current solo show of works by Italian artist Bona de Mandiargues (b.1926,Rome; d.2000, Paris), arrives fashionably late to the renewed interest and auction success of the much overlooked Surrealist women. Most recently, works by Dorothea Tanning and Remedios Varo achieved record prices at Christie's May marquee sale in New York– almost a century after André Breton declared women as ‘the most marvellous and disturbing problem there is in the world’ in his Manifesto of Surrealism (1929). In its final week of installment, this exhibition marks the first solo exhibition of de Mandiargues in the UK and my first experience of the fabric dreamscapes she referred to as ragarts. 

From left to right: Bona de Mandiargues, The Mountain Woman, 1991, Corinda Fights the Harpies, 1984

Bona moved to Paris in 1947 and immersed herself in the vibrancy of the city’s post-war creative milieu, connecting with key figures of the Surrealist circle– this included its instigator Breton, but more significantly, female artists such as Tanning, Meret Oppenheim and Leonor Fini.  In the first room, Paris’ Musée du louvre appears as the glittering golden centre and beak-like maw that gives voice to The Mountain Woman (1991). Crowned with a scrap metal spiral disc, Bona tributes the collective squwark of Surrealism’s excluded contributors; then, on the adjacent wall, high-heeled legs of a vaginal arachnid are kicking synchronically in The Jellyfish Water Rat (1985). In spite of their modest size and materials, the artist’s works are loud and protesting; they shout into the white-cube vacuum of the gallery space. 

From left to right: Bona de Mandiargues, Autoritratto / Self-portrait, 1994, Max Ernst, Loplop Introduces Members of the Surrealist Group (Loplop présente les membres du groupe surréaliste), 1931

In the second room, I am reminded of a 1931 collage by Max Ernst, which exclusively depicts the male members of the Surrealist group. In this work, a singular image of a woman appears as a Freudian-slip: a victim of the Femme-Enfant trope, she is confined to a frame, the glass jail reserved to the male surrealists’ artists-turned-muses. I enjoy thinking about Bona’s Self-Portrait (1994) as her artistic response to Ernst, adopting her keen needle to sew up the myth of the female muse. The raw canvas creates a similar framing device around her portrait. Yet, the fabric contours of her face have come unfixed; I stare at the two floating eyes and a mouth and notice the absurdity of their expression. Bona’s deconstruction of her visage is dissociative as its abstract shapes orbit the canvas, close to spinning off into the sparks that dominate The Fire (1987) on the opposite wall. Bona resists being stuck behind a frame as a static portrait; instead, her sliding fabric panels transcend such binaries and tap into the spontaneity of her own narrative. 

Installation images courtesy of Alison Jaques

In the same room, a large painting depicts anthropomorphic forms that occupy desolate landscapes, uncanny in their lack of texture. I find there to be a jarring contrast between the flatness of her painting and the textural intrigue of her collages. The inhabitants of her paintings are decidedly surreal, depicted in The Song of Creation (1975) as a hermaphroditic figure, a fusion of limbs and genitalia. Yet, the bricolage characters rendered from the ripped linings of her husband’s old suit jackets, are eerily animated. ‘She compared the action of sewing, assembling and cutting her ragarts  as close to that of a witch working her spell,’ says the exhibition curator, Simon Grant. The materials they are cut from are infused with her lived memory and human stories. 

If Leonora Carrington felt an affinity with the horse, for Bona it was all about the snail. The motif of the self-sufficient snail is seen throughout the exhibition, representing both wholeness and expansion. She worships its distinct spiral as an ideal–– ‘by embracing the shapes of the spiral,’ she said, ‘I’m embracing the very structure of the universe.’ It coils round the eyes of The Mime (1981) and the soft bodies belonging to her androgynous figures. 

Bona de Mandiargues,,The Painter’s Hand, 1992. Installation photography courtesy of Alison Jaques.

Also in the final room, is The Painter’s Hand (1992)– which I find reflects Bona as an artist more faithfully than her Self-portrait in the previous room. A human hand emerges from an earthy red background, but its fingers are antenna-like with rolling eyeballs on the end of their fingertips. It is assembled from the many segments of Bona’s dyed textiles and held by zig-zag stitching that slithers across the canvas like a snail trail. This work explores the sensory fathoming of the artist’s hand, which operates like the receptive body of the snail. Her instinctive process foregrounds both Bona’s personal and artistic philosophy, discernible in the thread-ends that wiggle off the canvas and dare to unravel. 

Whether consciously or not, Alison Jacques’ timely exhibition taps into another resurgence, that of the inimitable trace of the human touch against textiles. It is the hushed alchemy of needlework, the same ‘magic power of the needle’ that captivated Louise Bourgeois. The intersection of sewing and painting is quietly popping up in the multimedia works of emerging and contemporary artists. This is noticeable this month in London’s Degree Shows, and Harry Freegard’s current show at Soup Gallery– the press release of which describes ‘textile talisman’ and ‘manifestations of a meditative need to create.’ This pull towards sewing indicates a nostalgia for patently human practices and the slowed cogs of production. Bona’s ragarts weave a very human story of tearing and folding, unpicking and repairing. I think of dollmaking, patchwork-quilting, crochet— the twee work of the craft table is increasingly illustrious and signals the necessity of the quiet defiance of busy hands. 

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Jemima Jenkins is an art writer and artist based in Edinburgh.