Delineated Photographs

With these drawings, Bonillas returns to the subject of Martín-Lunas, but this time he does not use the slides that  J.R. Plaza “emended” by covering up his friend’s face with a black marker; instead, he returns to the archive of photographic prints, from which Martín-Lunas, a constant presence on the album pages, slowly begins to disappear — first, under the scissors wielded by Plaza and, later, because of the twists and turns of life, which ended up removing him from the account of the family’s life.

The first thing Bonillas did with the mutilated images was to trace the silhouettes in pencil, forming an initial group of drawings that somehow remind us of the chalk outlines on the ground around a victim’s body at a crime scene. In fact, these graphite lines are also there to indicate the perimeter of an absence.

Second, the artist turned to the old photogram technique (by virtue of which an image is created without the use of a camera, by putting an object in contact with a photosensitive surface and then exposing it to direct light) to create a new series of drawings, photogenic ones, which become, in a way, the photographs — the imprints — of the absence of other images.

With this series, Bonillas continues, while negating at the same time, what  J.R. Plaza began by cutting his brother-in-law out of the pictures. The photographic image disappears, at least in part, but as it disappears it generates a new image: in this case, an incidental drawing that the artist renders intentional and pushes to the extreme. More than images, perhaps we should say that Bonilla has created a phantasmatic system, through which the different disappearances of Martín-Lunas are strictly catalogued.