Tcharendar refers to the “day of 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.