Theatrum Imaginalis: Andrew Bonneau

" And l think that the wise men of old, who made temples and statues in the wish that the gods should be present to them, looking to the nature of the All, had in mind that the nature of soul is everywhere easy to attract. but that if someone were to construct something sympathetic to it and able to receive a part of it, it would of all things receive soul most easily. That which is sympathetic to it is what imitates it in some way, like a mirror able to catch the reflection of a form.” Plotinus, Ennead IV.3.11

Andrew Bonneau has long been admired as one of the finest portrait painters in Australia today. His portraits of friends, artists, headmasters and industrialists have been finalists in the Archibald, the Doug Moran and most other notable portrait prizes and his work is held in private and public collections throughout Australia, including the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, Sydney Grammar School, Macquarie Bank and the State Library of NSW. He is also known for his still life paintings, sometimes deceptively simple, sometimes elaborate and filled with sumptuous, exotic and enigmatically symbolic objects. And some of these objects, with their religious or philosophical associations, hint at the new and ambitious collection of works that is presented in this exhibition. Ideas and belief systems implicit and yet resonant in the quiet still life compositions emerge and unfold into elaborate theatres of spiritual meditation unlike anything else in contemporary painting in this country. These are figure paintings, but not like so many of the modernist period, where the figure is stripped of any narrative role and reduced to a nude reclining on a sofa, or at most a group of bathers on the banks of a river. The reason for the pre-eminence of the human figure in Western art was not simply the sense of its beauty and harmony that we inherited from the Greeks, but also its importance as a vehicle for narrative pictures, or what was traditionally called history painting. This was the highest genre in the early modern period, telling poetically and morally significant stories from Scripture, history or mythology; other genres such as landscape and still life played a subordinate role in history painting before establishing themselves as independent genres in more recent centuries. It is the primacy of history painting that explains the fundamental place of figure drawing in the curriculum of modern art schools. Artists had to be able to invent the poses and actions required for complex narrative scenes, and this could only be achieved by years of practice drawing from models and – as Leonardo suggested – sketching the real and spontaneous actions of people in streets and marketplaces. Life drawing began casually in the Renaissance workshop and later became the core discipline of the new academies that arose in the seventeenth century. Indeed it was only later in the nineteenth century that art schools started to teach the crafts of painting and sculpture as well, formerly learnt by apprenticeship in the studio of a master. 

Bonneau has for years sought out and studied the skills of the classical painting tradition; and it is appropriate to speak of seeking out, for it cannot be assumed today that any public art school will offer substantial teaching in these fundamental skills. He was fortunate to make a start at the National Art School before the appointment of Anita Taylor as Director in 2009 caused so much damage to the curriculum there; after that he trained with Charlie Sheard, then at the Julian Ashton Art School, and finally several valuable years at the Grand Central Academy in New York. Subsequently, he spent three months at the British School at Rome on a William Fletcher Foundation Fellowship, which he spent closely studying the great masterpieces of High Renaissance art and the sculptural masterpieces of Greco-Roman antiquity. But although Bonneau is thus steeped in precisely the sort of training that for centuries prepared young painters for the history painting genre, the pictures in this series are not strictly narrative compositions. They belong instead to the other genre that in principle shared equal prestige with history painting but was in practice much less discussed in early modern theory, perhaps because of a decline in interest in overtly sacred subjects: and that is what can broadly be called allegory. In literature, an allegorical tale or description is one in which each element has a coded symbolic meaning, like the symbolic beasts at the start of Dante’s Inferno or the light of four stars on Cato’s face, signifying the Cardinal Virtues, in the first canto of Purgatorio. An allegorical painting is one in which the figures stand for ideas, as Mars embodies war in Rubens’ Minerva protecting Pax from Mars (1629-30) or Consequences of War (1638-39). Bonneau’s paintings have something in common with another genre which can be loosely related to allegory, the Sacra Conversazione, in which the Madonna and Child are typically surrounded by a group of saints from different historical periods. A characteristic of such compositions, of which the most beautiful are perhaps by Giovanni Bellini, like the San Zaccaria Altarpiece (1505), is their absolute stillness, and the mysterious way that each figure seems to be in its own world, as though unaware of those that surround it in the composition. These qualities are enhanced by the architectural interiors in which the figures are set, which help to unify the composition and enhance the sense of contemplative harmony.