“Christian Bonnefoi often returns to the motif and question of the back, as if it were a starting point that is constantly revisited, rediscovered, and reoriented. As the original focus of all his pictorial work, the question of the back is like a basso continuo: a underlying theme that supports and underpins the unfolding of various voices and melodies above it. The works exhibited here were created during a period that could be described as one of tightening or withdrawal, a time when, not being occupied by any of the major series that structure his work, the artist turned to this basso continuo, which was thus becoming more distinctly audible, to what was beginning to settle on the background as the waters on the surface became still. This is where these backs were born, miniatures that, while echoing the rest of the work, explored one after the other the spaces of a new territory.”