Iñaki Bonillas | Escritura nocturna (Nocturnal Writing)

About

The solo exhibition entitled Escritura nocturna (Nocturnal Writing) features the artist’s latest project of the same name alongside the series A Storm of Secondary Things. Iñaki Bonillas’ new series of prints, Escritura nocturna (Nocturnal Writing), 2015, borrows its name from Charles Barbier’s code system, the forerunner of Braille. Soldiers used it during the Napoleonic Wars to communicate silently and without light in the darkness. The project is based on photographs, collected by the artist’s grandfather, kept in black letter size pieces of paper and then covered with embracing plastic sleeves. After years of protecting the images from dust and erosion, these photographs had stamped their contour onto the sheets with such precision that we see pages full of empty pictures, hollow rectangles—like ghosts of past images, or a code that needs to be deciphered: a nocturnal writing.

In his photogravure-series A Storm of Secondary Things, 2012, Bonillas addresses ‘secondariness’ by extracting scenes from the overlooked background of photographs by the artist’s grandfather. Bonillas renders the twenty-five newly emerged images in the secondary colours green, orange, and violet. He links elements that are a priori incompatible: A personal, biographical narrative that consists of private anecdotes and emotions on one, and the quasi-scientific practices of compilating, classifying, and archiving on the other hand.