By Mike Landry
One of Alain Bonder's menacing doily works.
When Alain Bonder was living in Montreal his dad used to send him random images with notes scrawled on the bottom. One of his favourites was an image from an old Italian horror movie of a man cowering under the covers.
For many years the note lived stuck to the Ottawa-based painter’s walls. But something clicked last year, and Bonder decided to pair his own macabre rendering of the image in black and monster green with an ornate doily dipped heavily in black paint. Although it was meant to be a keeper, Bonder soon found himself with an entire series called Fear the Doily.
“On top the doily looks dead on like a UFO to me. So it was this strange object, but at the same it’s something that would never hurt you,” says Bonder. “You would have to really try to be hurt by a doily.”
The doily series marks a departure from and a continuation of Bonder’s recent work. Like his past paintings of starlets, equine and other seemingly random images usually off-centre and accompanied by a large mass of black paint, his initial concept for “doily zero” was composed with the same instinctual process of combining images. But unlike his past work, this was one of the first times Bonder had consciously work on a series.
“From one piece to another it’s very rare that I can do the same thing, because I just get bored. It’s impossible for me to redo the same thing. I wind up punching a hole it, because it feels forced. But it was nice to be able to exploit an idea and really work it.”
The doily experiment was also fun in terms of research. Never really a fan of science fiction or old horror movies, Bonder has started to appreciate the genre.
More than camp pop art though, Fear the Doily is also a strong statement about materialism. Replacing the monsters with dainty doilies, Bonder aims to show how the real monster in our everyday lives is excess and comfort. It’s something he feels we suffer from subconsciously, and that our compulsion to keep things clean and squared away has affected our natural thought patterns.
“It was basically about how the objects that we own consume us. The doily is an object that’s used to protect another object. It never ends. We keep building up these things, and now doilies have to be perfect as well. It basically consumes us.”
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