JULIEN BONET - Lovers

Technique: Promptography on Hahnemühle Fine Art paper
Size: 50 x 40 cm
Edition: 3 + 1 AP
Year: 2024-25

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

Lovers

Two bodies, indistinguishably entwined, wrapped in a web of straw-colored fibers. No faces, no hands, just a shared, amorphous figure standing in the cornfield like an ancient symbol of fertility.

"Lovers" is a meditation on closeness and dissolution: Where does the "I" end and the "you" begin? In this tangle of bodies and nature, the boundaries between individual and community, between love and dependence, blur. It's an image that simultaneously evokes warmth and confinement—a protective cocoon and a prison.

Culturally and historically, parallels can be drawn here to harvest customs and fertility rituals in which couples were veiled in grain or straw to celebrate the connection between humanity and nature and safeguard the cycle of life. Bonet transforms this archaic symbolism into a contemporary mythogram: an embrace that depicts not only lovers, but the interconnectedness of all life—in an age of ecological fragility.

In the context of the series Maskeraden, the lover becomes a counter-image to the figures of fear: it embodies not terror, but intimacy – and raises the question of whether, in a world of crisis, love itself can become the most radical form of resistance.

Part of the ongoing series Masquerades – contemporary myths between fear, ritual and collective memory.