JULIEN BONET - Miner

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.

miners

A body, encased in faceted, black blocks, stands like a statue at the edge of a landscape where nature and the city intersect. The figure appears simultaneously mineral and human—a being of coal or obsidian, born from the depths of the earth.

Bonet's miner embodies the ambivalence of the raw materials age. He represents those invisible existences who toil in secret while cities grow and prosperity flourishes. The shiny surface of the costume evokes the value of the extracted materials, while the figure's heaviness and immobility recall the burden of mining and the destruction of the landscape.

Historically, Bonet draws on the iconography of the worker as hero and victim, from Soviet realism to Western miner myths. Yet in this post-digital mask, the worker is not heroic, but anonymized—a fragment in the web of global supply chains, at once superfluous and indispensable.

In the context of the series Masqueraders, Miner becomes an allegory of the Anthropocene: He reminds us that every progress has its price – and that beneath the shiny surfaces of our technologies, the shadows of extraction always lurk.

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