Alkinois is pleased to present “Tcharendar” by Sébastien Bonin. Tcharendar refers to the “day of the bread,” a recurring moment within the cyclical economy of rural life, where action belongs less to the event than to repetition. In this exhibition, Sébastien Bonin derives objects from rural craftsmanship — tools, agricultural devices, domestic forms — approached as carriers of memory and transmission. In its foundations there is a structural principle: the multiple. Forms appear in pairs, duplicates, or series. This repetition is neither decorative nor industrial; it is necessary. A shoe implies its counterpart, a pattern calls for another, a gesture exists only because it can be repeated. The multiple ensures the survival and circulation of forms across time.
The sculptures displace utilitarian objects from their original function. Shoes become bear’s feet; mountain crampons are isolated as autonomous forms; hay-beating sticks, stacked cones of unleavened bread, and straw mats used in cheese-making are cast in bronze. The material introduces tension: it fixes and monumentalises forms originally conceived for wear, replacement, and cyclical use.
The paintings extend this logic through duplication and fragmentation. Fences subjected to the movement of the sun, wooden shoemaking patterns, textile tools, and elemental gestures are layered within structured compositions. Human figures — sharpening, carving — function as operators of gestures, rather than portraits, embedded in a chain of know-how. Preservation here is not nostalgic; it oscillates between continuity and reintroduction, between what is transmitted uninterrupted and what returns through rediscovery and reactivation.
Trained in screen printing at ENSAV La Cambre, Bonin expanded his practice through photographic experimentation before establishing painting as a central axis of his work following his 2015 exhibition at Wiels. For Bonin, painting is a cosa mentale situated between abstraction and figuration, shaped by documents, art history, literature, and fragments of contemporary information.
Resisting the rhetoric of originality, Bonin embraces interpretation as a condition of culture. In an era marked by comparison, his work positions repetition not as imitation, but as structure. Addition, erasure, layering, and transformation become methods of constructing images that operate simultaneously as objects and as mental spaces.
Sébastien Bonin founded the exhibition platform Island in 2012. His work has been exhibited at Wiels, BOZAR, Botanique (Brussels), Karl Marx Studio (Paris), and Ixelles Museum (Brussels).
With the support of Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles.
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The Memory of Gestures
Tcharendar is a word from the patois of the Hautes-Alpes referring to the moment when bread is made to last through the winter. In Alpine villages, where seasonal cycles long structured collective life, this preparation was far more than a domestic task. It marked a shared moment within an economy of subsistence in which foresight, the repetition of gestures, and the careful use of resources shaped everyday existence. Objects, tools and skills circulated within this web of practices: they were repaired, passed on, adapted and sometimes transformed from one generation to the next.
It is within this horizon that Sébastien Bonin’s practice takes shape. Having grown up in this region, the artist draws on a repertoire of forms connected to rural and artisanal labour. Yet his work is neither reconstruction nor ethnographic testimony. Through painting and sculpture he performs a displacement: everyday objects become autonomous forms, detached from their immediate function while still carrying the memory of the gestures that produced them.
The sculptures often originate in modest elements drawn from this material world. Shoes, for instance, appear transformed into bear’s feet, as if the domestic object were sliding towards a more archaic or animal dimension. Mountain crampons— tools designed to grip ice and rock, are isolated and presented as almost abstract forms, revealing an unexpected geometry. Elsewhere, objects associated with agricultural or alimentary practices, sticks used for beating hay, cones for unleavened bread, or straw mats employed in the maturation of cheese, are recast in bronze. This translation into metal introduces a temporal tension: objects conceived for use, wear and replacement are suddenly stabilised in a material associated with durability and memory.
Painting develops another dimension of this inquiry. Motifs often appear fragmented or repeated, as if the images retained only certain elements of a larger scene. One recognises wooden fences, agricultural structures exposed to the shifting path of the sun, wooden patterns used in the making of shoes, or tools associated with
textile practices. The human figures that occasionally appear, sharpening a blade, shaping a piece of wood, are not treated as portraits. Rather, they function as operators of gestures: bodies engaged in a precise action, situated within a chain of knowledge and technique.
What is at stake in these works is therefore not the simple representation of a rural world, but an attempt to render perceptible a material culture in which forms emerge from use and repetition. The objects the artist summons testify to a relationship with the world shaped by daily experience: a way of working with available materials, repeating learned gestures, and slowly transforming forms over time.
In this sense, Bonin’s practice resonates with what Pierre Bourdieu described
as habitus: a set of embodied dispositions, acquired through practice and repetition, which orient ways of doing, perceiving and inhabiting the world. Gestures transmitted in workshops, farms or homes become a silent memory inscribed in both bodies and objects.
The works gathered in Tcharendar offer a meditation on this memory. By isolating forms drawn from everyday labour, reproducing them, and translating them into different materials or scales, the artist reveals the invisible structures that sustain material life. Tools become signs, gestures become rhythms, and objects become archives of practice.
Through these displacements, sculpture and painting do not seek to fix a static tradition. Rather, they show how forms continue to circulate, transform and be transmitted. Like the moment of tcharendar itself, when the community prepares today what will allow it to endure the winter, the works occupy a space between memory and continuity, where gestures from the past find new forms through which to persist in the present.
Maria Inés Rodriguez