Wings of a Butterfly

By Greg Thomas, 28.03.2025

Pierre Bonnard 'Garden at Le Canet', c. 1943. Photograph by John McKenzie

Can you hear a Bonnard painting? It’s a question that seems to preoccupy many of his acolytes. “I imagine the sound his brush might have made, from the moment it touches the canvas to when it lifts away”, writes Shota Nakamara, one of 12 artists included in Ingleby’s new group show Wings of a Butterfly, which explores Bonnard’s inheritances in contemporary painting and sculpture. Another, Michael Clarence, describes the master’s work as “bristling with a static noise we can almost feel.” Hayley Barker, whose huge, oil-on-linen nature scene ‘Tessa’s Garden’ (2024) is a showstopper, puts it like this: “Bonnard feels colour with all his sense: temperature, touch, smell, sound. I have synaesthesia, and I bet he did as well.”

The starting point for this show is Bonnard’s final diary entry, from 1947: “I should like to present myself to the young painters of the year 2000 with the wings of a butterfly.” Born in 1867, the Parisian-born painter was part of a fin de siècle generation who transfigured the optical experiments of the Impressionists, ultimately arriving at a more emotive wielding of colour, shape, pattern, and line. Like his peers in the Nabis group, including Sérusier and Denis, he was influenced by the flat colour planes of Gaugin (particularly ‘Vision after the Sermon’ [1888]) and Japanese art. The collective’s work paved the way for the patterned, flattened surfaces of the Fauves and the dreamy palettes of Expressionism.

Whereas others in his cohort embraced various forms of spiritual and philosophical credo, Bonnard’s muse remained a light-hearted one. He was concerned with illumination in the literal sense, with colour and surfaces; the ways in which images grow in imagination once gone (he usually painted from memory). To paraphrase Nietzsche on the Greeks, perhaps Bonnard was “superficial out of profundity”.

His later work is defined by hazy patterns and textures formed from close mark-making. Forms and surfaces almost seem to throb or buzz on the canvas. Perhaps it’s partly this quality of movement that gives his work an affinity with sound, a medium experienced in time.

The quality that most clearly recalls Bonnard in the modern works on display is the sense that much of it presents a vision recalled in memory. Pheobe Unwin’s ‘Structure’ (2024), placed next to Bonnard’s teeming ‘Garden at Le Cannet’ (c. 1943), is an elemental garden of the mind, a silver branch patterns overlaid on dark green and mauve finger-prints, fading to teal and then to pale ochre void. In Aubrey Leventhal’s ‘Nights in C’s Room’ (2024), translucent bodies seem to sink into the fabric of the scene, as if we are seeing a composite of ghostly snapshots, the compression of a fleeting domestic life.

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A Bonnard-esque love of depthless, patterned surfaces is very much to the fore in works by Andrew Cranston and Phoebe Unwin (‘Fairly Liquid’ [2025] and ‘A Bath Six Times Over’ [2025]). Both bathroom scenes are dominated by expanses of closely aligned, blotchy square tiles, echoing the patterned blue smudges in Bonnard’s ‘Study for Nude with a Chair’ (c. 1935), which is placed between them. As in Leventhal’s painting, these works also suggest Bonnard’s intimism, his preoccupation with familiar, interior spaces that imply a deep emotional resonance for the artist 

Others take the dreamlike qualities of Bonnard’s work further. Lorna Robertson’s ‘Half-remembered names and faces’ (2025) is a luminous puff of leaf-shapes and umbrellas, whose constituent forms imply familiarity without offering a cohesive figurative scene. Nakamura’s ‘Melchsee’ (2024) is a more expressionist piece, with elongated windows and silhouetted face in a pink-purple colour scheme.

It's not immediately clear why engagement with Bonnard is topical just now. But maybe that doesn’t matter when considering an artist so resolutely uninterested in hidden depths – who was superficial out of profundity. This is a joyful show for joy’s sake.

 Wings of a Butterfly is exhibited at Ingleby until 19^th April