Bonco | Count the stars - if indeed you can: {Suite} Ponsonby

The biblical story in Genesis 15 recounts an event known as ‘the covenant of the pieces’, in which God reveals himself to Abraham and forms a covenant with the Hebrew people. In response to God’s declaration that the Land of Israel will be inherited by his descendants, Abraham voices concern for being childless, to which the Lord responds: “Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them. So shall your offspring be.”

It was this verse that inspired Bonco’s most recent series of paintings; the title plucked directly from this exchange between Abraham and God. ‘Count the stars - if indeed you can’ presents a series of seven abstract paintings gridded into geometric compositions that vary in size and design, each methodically worked and reworked before their form is eventually settled on. Alongside five paintings configured with vibrant colours, and each quartered so as to suggest the presence of a window, sit two monochrome variants, evocative of an open night sky. Recognizable only by subtle shifts in Bonco’s palette, zodiac constellations are embedded in the patterns, vestiges of the Sun’s path across the celestial sphere. 

These works symbolise the artist’s interpretation of God’s advice to Abraham; however, rather than contemplating the patriarch’s bloodline, it was instead the impossibility of the task that drew Bonco to this passage. The sky fills with thousands of stars every night, and billions exist beyond those visible to the naked eye. To count each one would be a fool’s errand, certain to result in failure and prone to imperfection. Though, despite this - or perhaps, because of the unthinkability of the task - one ought to try. 

At least, this is the mentality Bonco instils in his practice, understanding his art to be an expression of the futility of perfectionism, where meaning instead emerges through the endeavour itself. These latest works can be seen as an embodiment of this sentiment. The product of hours worth of trial and error, they possess a quality of restraint and dedication quintessential to geometric abstraction. This is offset, however, by their inherent spontaneity. Bonco creates ad lib, his paintings constructed with awareness and intuition, though without premeditation or calculation. He describes this as in many ways typifying abstraction as an art form; a union of the mathematical with the metaphysical that gives rise to rhythm and harmony.

Excerpt from essay by Tamar Torrance