Bonfield’s figurative paintings often stem from her longstanding interest in Renaissance emblem books and the use of the figure as an archetypal personification of allegory. The works Day and Night, presented in the exhibition, developed from an image encountered in a book from the artist’s personal collection: a drawing attributed to Giorgio Vasari after Michelangelo’s representation of Day in the Medici Chapel in Florence, associated with Vasari’s Libro de’ Disegni. Already transmitted across artists, mediums and time, the image becomes another form of inheritance in Bonfield’s hands. Michelangelo’s personifications of Day and Night transform temporal states into human form, an allegorical approach that resonates with the visual language of the Emblemata, in which figures and symbols give form to abstract ideas. Through repeated drawing, Bonfield reworked and inverted the image of Day, developing it into a pair of paintings that suggest an ongoing cycle between day and night. For the Project Room, she also moves away from the delicate layers of butter muslin characteristic of earlier works towards unstretched canvas, allowing greater freedom and fluidity in the movement of paint. Created in fragmented moments between caregiving and domestic life, the paintings develop through swift, liquid marks, interruption and return, embedding the rhythms of their making within the work.

Text by Paola Lucente