JULIEN BONET - Corona

Technique: Promptography on Hahnemühle Fine Art paper
Size: 50 x 40 cm
Edition: 3 + 1 AP
Year: 2023

Signed, dated and edition numbered by the artist on a separate label.

corona

A figure wrapped in yellow. Antlers, skull, hands—a totem of fear and memory. At the center: a black screen, empty as an eye, staring at us yet revealing nothing. Corona is not a mere mask, but a monument to the collective experience: the condensation of a time in which death and isolation, panic and emptiness, became global rituals.

Bonet translates the pandemic not into numbers or headlines, but into an archetype: bones that both warn and protect; hands that simultaneously grasp and release; a body lost in symbolism. This figure represents not a virus, but the shock that shattered our self-image—the experience that progress and control can be illusions.

In the context of the Masquerades series, Corona connects to ancient practices: masks that once warded off demons return here to remind us of our own fragility. But this time, instead of nature gods, it is humanity itself that creates the threat—global-connected, technologically advanced, and yet more vulnerable than ever before.

The image doesn't question guilt, but rather memory: What myths will we tell ourselves in the future when we look back on these years? And who will carry the stories—the living or their masks?