Fracois Bonnel is Finding the 'Geometry of Joy' After Advertising Career

François Bonnel pivoted from 25 years in advertising to creative work including photography, digital media, and painting. His new body of work, “François Bonnel: The Geometry of Joy,” is scheduled to be shown with Maddox Gallery in Mayfair, London. Bonnel values abstraction for its suggestive quality, where overlapping color swathes imply three-dimensional space and create relationships among color, form, and perspective. Compositions are guided by intuition, and interpretation depends on the viewer. Geometric and hard-edge references appear, but rigid rules are avoided through playful line, with rectangles and squares bulging and curving as if responding to internal gravity. Light varies from neutral grounds to dark, inky bases with contrasting lighter shapes.

"“What I like most about abstraction is its suggestive quality,” says Bonnel. And what is suggested in the artist's paintings is uniquely interpretable. While elements of three-dimensional space are alluded to, as in the overlapping swathes of color in (2026), where a horizontal stretches of color converge and weave throughout the canvas. The result is a consideration of color, form, perspective, and the idiosyncratic relationships Bonnel crafts."

"Ultimately, each composition is dictated by the artist's intuition, ultimately it is up to the viewer to meet him halfway, as the effects of these juxtapositions remain highly individual. “I like to think of abstraction as the materialization of the imagination, from the perspective of both the artist and the viewer.”"

"And while Bonnel's paintings evoke the visual language of geometric or hard-edge abstraction, they resist the prescriptive, unyielding parameters of either. Instead, a sense of playfulness is introduced through the artist's use of line. Rectangles and squares bulge and curve, appearing to interact with the volume of other shapes, indicating a type of internal gravity felt only by the elements included within the frame."

"Light too plays an intrinsic role; though many of Bonnel's paintings exhibit a neutral, light ground, others like I Really Like You (2026) exhibit a dark, inky base with lighter, contrasting shapes"

Read at Artnet News