Exhibitions
Sara Bonache explores the desire that connects all species
The winner of the 2025 Antoni Vila Casas Painting Award presents at Can Framis The Air That Dances in the Mouth, a pictorial investigation into the forms of attraction shared between humans, insects and other living beings.
Sara Bonache's painting explores the forms of attraction that connect living beings and blur the boundaries between the human, animal and plant worlds. With L'aire que balla a la boca , the artist proposes a look at desire that goes beyond the human experience to investigate the bonds we share with other species. The Vila Casas Foundation presents this exhibition at the Can Framis Museum in Barcelona, where it can be visited until February 7. Bonache, winner of the Antoni Vila Casas Painting Award 2025 with the work Nocturnes (2025), thus expands a pictorial investigation that finds its main common thread in symbiosis and the relationships between organisms.
Through painting and pastel, Bonache unfolds an exuberant visual universe in which the boundaries between the human, animal and plant worlds blur. Forms transform, come closer and establish relationships that invite us to reconsider the limits between species. The exhibition proposes a change of scale, from micro to macro, to discover affinities that usually go unnoticed and imagine other ways of inhabiting the natural world, from a more horizontal and interconnected perspective.
Desire becomes the guiding thread of this exploration. The artist observes the forms that attract insects and relates them to those that arouse our own attraction. Rather than establishing a separation between human sensitivity and animal behavior, Bonache seeks points of contact between different ways of perceiving, relating to, and responding to stimuli. His painting thus opens up a territory of correspondences in which what we consider exclusively human is revealed as part of a much broader network of relationships.
The project originated in Nocturnes , a work that was part of an investigation into the night linked to the Marc Domènech Gallery. According to Bonache, the process led her to "the most biological part of the night" and connected her to the idea of symbiosis, that is, to the relationships between humans and the plant world. From this investigation arose the desire to delve deeper into the connections between organisms and shared forms of attraction.
The title of the exhibition summarizes this desire to transfer an experience from one language to another. The air that dances in the mouth is, in the artist's words, 'a poetic and metaphorical image of language, of a message'. Bonache explains that his work consists of bringing this spoken message "to the language of painting and the language of desire". The word, the gesture and the image thus find themselves in a space of translation in which painting is not limited to representing forms, but seeks to activate sensations and establish new correspondences.
In this sense, the exhibition also takes as a reference Georgia O'Keeffe's gesture of transforming the intimate into the monumental. As in the work of the American artist, the enlargement of forms allows us to modify perception and give a new dimension to elements that often go unnoticed. Bonache recovers this operation to open a space of contemplation from which to review the way we look at and relate to nature.
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