Mahdavi and Bonnard: making room for art

India Mahdavi's bold, talented, immersive work translates the paintings of Pierre Bonnard, the artist specialising in home interiors, light and colour, into a spatial design, creating totalising spaces around visitors viewing the exhibition of over a hundred works by the French Post-Impressionist painter at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV International) in Melbourne. The exhibition title, ‘Pierre Bonnard: designed by India Mahdavi’, is innovative in that it puts the work of the artist and the exhibition designer on the same level, as the designer's work creates a three-dimensional world which is a projection of the artistic world contained in the paintings.

India Mahdavi builds a scene of three-dimensional surfaces all around the paintings, including chairs, tables, and carpets that take onlookers into Bonnard's poetic universe and immerse them in it. It really works: the installation does not predominate but backs up the work of the painter, who explored the power of colour at the end of the nineteenth century and in the early decades of the twenty-first century, using it as his primary tool for describing ‘the theatre of the everyday’ (as he called his subjects), made up of home interiors, still lifes, gardens, landscapes in the Nordic mists or the sunshine of southern France.

The symbiotic relationship between the two personalities works surprisingly well. Mahdavi, a naturalised French designer and architect born of an Iranian father and an Egyptian mother, seems to take over the baton from Bonnard, proceeding in her own way. She transfers the colours onto the walls, creates new patterns, and adds rhythm to the partitions between the rooms, with the aid of windows connecting the spaces. She adds chairs, sofas, tables, and stools, dotting the exhibition route with her furnishings, as if the halls of the gallery were a dilated house, with a cosy French feel, imbued with grace. Mahdavi herself calls her work ‘an impression of Bonnard's world, through my own eyes’. There are undeniably affinities between the two: their sensibility about colour, above all, but also meditative atmospheres stippled with a subtle melancholy.

The collection of Bonnard's works opens up a broad view of his poetic imagery, in which glimpses of outside from inside and vice versa (a genre of painting he is considered to have invented), tables with dishes or books on them, tablecloths, fruit, and his wife Marthe de Méligny in a private moment become his favourite subjects, from his Paris years, when he joined the Nabis along with Édouard Vuillard and Paul Sérusier, to his years in Normandy and then on the French Riviera. Beginning with this universe, India Mahdavi organises the partitions, and defines the colours of the walls and floors of the rooms: pasty colours, from caramel to orange, from purple to pink, from pale blue to yellow; and then, colourful textures applied to the walls, with floral motifs or stripes, squares, and lozenges that look like something out of a watercolour album. Tiny patterns, sometimes, densely packed with colours, which however do not interfere with the paintings, but dialogue with them, casting new light upon them.

“Monsieur Bonnard and I share the same passion for colour ”, says Mahdavi, “the way he invites us in his home and intimacy is sublimated by his very own sense of colour. For this exhibition, we dived into Pierre Bonnard's paintings and extracted some of his patterns and colours to recreate backdrops to his paintings, offering an immersive experience of a home to the visitor.” The designer notes that “Bonnard always saturates the space of his paintings. The use of colours, the use of light is quite incredible. And I think this is what I try to do in this show. I love the domestic feeling about it and I think it also carries the sense of joy. Space is not only about physical comfort or visual comfort”, she concludes, “it's also emotional comfort. And I think colours bring that to me.”

Antonella Galli

Pierre Bonnard: Designed by India Mahdavi
NGV International - National Gallery of Victoria
In partnership with Musée d’Orsay
180 St Kilda Road, Melbourne www.ngv.vic.gov.au/
Until 8 October 2023

Captions

01, 03, 04, 06-13 Exhibition installation in the halls of the NGV International in Melbourne; ph. Lillie Thompson
02 Architect and designer India Mahdavi, ph. Tim Carrafa
05 Le Paravent: La Promenade des nourrices, frise de fiacres by Pierre Bonnard, 1895, in India Mahdavi's exhibition installation in the halls of the NGV International in Melbourne; ph. Lillie Thompson
14 Portrait of India Mahdavi, ph. Lillie Thompson

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