JULIEN BONET - Poor

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.

Poor

A body that dances and begs at the same time. The figure of the Poor originates from landscapes of industrial decline—places where machines once roared and chimneys billowed smoke into the sky, but now only emptiness remains. In this figure, Bonet condenses the loss of an entire era: work that disappeared; dignity that shattered; community that remained in fragments.

The pockets of the costume are open wounds, ready for coins, for the smallest sign of human affection. Yet this act of giving alms harbors ambivalence: compassion and condescension, guilt and liberation at the same time. Historically, such figures carry a double meaning – beggars appeared in medieval processions as admonishing mirrors of humility, later in carnivals as grotesque exaggerations of deprivation and excess.

In Poor, these layers converge: the dance becomes a ritual that conjures memories of past abundance while simultaneously transforming poverty into a performance. Between ruins and hope, between mockery and empathy, an image emerges that questions our present: Who are the poor today amidst abundance? And how do we see them—as people or as projections of our own fears and longings?

Bonet's series "Maskades" transforms social roles into archetypal masks. "Poor" is not just an image of poverty, but an echo of our repressed history—and a mirror for what we have learned to overlook.