Catalogue essay by Blanche Llewellyn

Bona de Mandiargues was a Surrealist Italian-French artist, writer, and translator. In Paris, she met the poet André Pieyre de Mandiargues whom she married in 1950, who introduced her to Breton, Ponge, and Paulhan.

After a formative phase stylistically influenced by the example of her uncle, Filippo de Pisis, Bona developed a figurative painting style nourished by collecting numerous aquatic, mineral and plant objects, conducted by the surrealist research of the wonderful and the disturbing. In 1958, Bona developed a technique that would come to characterize her work in the following years; it was during a trip to Mexico that she discovered by chance the suggestive power of the linings of her husband’s jackets. Employing a sewing machine for the assembly of felt and fabric, she introduced a novel dimension to her artistic expression, that she found gave her work a more surrealist edge than the more classic medium of oil paint.

La Lubricità (which translates as a slippery surface – a title which has obvious sexual connotations), created in 1970, is a collage and fabric sewn on canvas depicting a grotesque surrealist snail. In this oeuvre, Bona rejects the roles of women-muse and women-child, prevalent in the field of Surrealism. Instead, she nearly depicts herself as the snail (complete with high heeled shoe), a hermaphrodite animal and ambiguous figure, simultaneously friendly and repellent. For Bona, the snail is a symbol of androgynism, of softness (the animal) and hardness (the shell), and of the continuous perseverance of its restless mind.