Benoît Bonnemaison-Fitte (or Bonnefrite, or Bonfrit, depending on the mood) is a funny guy. For about fifteen years, in his Haute-Garonne village, he has been carving an unusual path in the drawing and graphic design worlds. His creations can be seen most of the time on advertising medium for theater, festivals, and various cultural events. As well as on posters for parties at the local swimming pool! Sometimes, he draws live during readings, music shows and performances. Occasionally, he will paint signage directly on walls. He has also wrote a picture book, Le Voyage de Gus (Gus’s Journey).
He has an unconventional approach, similar to graphic design, where the machine replaces more often than not the artist’s hand. If we had to give Benoît Bonnemaison-Fitte a professional label, it would undoubtedly be “poster designer”. But a poster designer such as he imagined himself to be in the tradition that preceded computers: the gesture being central, and the technique being peripheral. It is this imaginary, the one of colorful advertising and of the 1930s and 1960s just forms, that can be found in attics and jaunted magazines, that shapes his imaginary: “I glean to work. I don’t look for my sources of inspiration in exhibitions or catalogues, but in the objects I collect. This is a way for me to be totally autonomous: I work with what I find, and I attach as much importance to the way I find them as to the use I make of them. Books, toys, posters, marbles, cars…”
Tapping into a junk shop of popular objects, shapes and imagery, he transforms the ordinary into the bizarre, the banal into the surreal. His visual vocabulary is all at once joyful and unsettling, chatty and quiet, specific and messy, calm and nervous, bright and gloomy, colorful and black, full and empty… All and nothing! In the drawing kingdom, Benoît Bonnemaison-Fitte, pencil in hand, travels on horseback through a landscape of opposites. A wild, bizarre and marvellous landscape, inhabited by ghostly and indeterminate creatures, that naturally finds their place in the Studio Fotokino, since it has now been over five years that our paths have crossed.
