At first glance, the exhibition risks appearing almost deliberately crude: an unruly mix of cartoon imagery, collisions of saturated colour and chaotic mark-making. ‘It looks really trashy, but when you look closer that changes’, curator Mitchell Anderson remarks of artist Florent Bonzon’s exhibition may floréal. The term finds an immediate, almost literal echo in the gallery itself, where remnants of a Friday evening gathering linger as a kind of ambient debris. Yet ‘trashy’ here proves less a dismissal than a useful entry point. It names an aesthetic of excess, a refusal of compositional restraint, a deliberate over-saturation that presses against the limits of taste. What initially reads as noise gradually discloses its structure, resolving into choreography of recurring forms – skeletons, flames, explosions, clouds, cartoon figures – held in a volatile but precise balance.
The exhibition consists of eight works produced this year after Bonzon’s residency in Japan: five paintings and three sculptures mark a new formal phase in the artist’s work while drawing on themes of death and nostalgia that have long characterised his practice.
The eye is drawn almost immediately to the two large-scale canvases each titled dadanse macabre / tototentanz (2026). They register as eruptions of pink, blue, yellow, and graphite-black gestures as oil, wax crayon and graphite race across the surface in looping marks. The canvases recall the expressive confidence of postwar gestural painting, borrowing from the painterly abandon associated with Cy Twombly or Jean-Michel Basquiat while quietly unsettling its mythology. From within this flux, five skeletons emerge from the field, their bodies flickering between legibility and dissolution, collapsing into loose bones, stars, clouds and abstracted explosions. Especially in the right-hand canvas, colour, form and motif achieve a precarious and skilful balance based on repetition, accumulation and visual equilibrium. As the initial impression of chaos settles, a more legible iconography emerges, bringing into focus a network of historical references.
Florent Bonzon, may floréal, Plymouth Rock, 2026
The title of the paintings, dadanse macabre, invites historical reflection. The visual and literary motif of the ‘danse macabre’ spread throughout Europe in the 15th century. It traditionally depicted a skeleton personifying death escorting kings, peasants, clergy and merchants alike towards the grave, acting as a memento mori. Over the centuries, iterations have included Hans Holbein’s woodcuts, Camille Saint-Saëns’s 1974 musical composition or Walt Disney’s 1929 animation of The Skeleton Dance. (1) The danse macabre insists upon mortality as the great social equaliser, reminding its audience of the vanity of worldly ambition. Bonzon’s historical and intellectual references do not end there. The doubled syllables of dadanse macabre / totoentanz recall Jacques Lacan’s notion of lalangue, in which rhythm and repetition precede strict grammatical rule and fixed meaning. The exhibition title may floréal invokes the French Republican Calendar, whose revolutionary renaming of the months (May became Floréal) sought to establish a new order of time. These references reveal an artist drawn less to historical quotation than to the continual reinvention of cultural forms. How should we read this persistent dialogue with history? Is Bonzon participating in a broader contemporary impulse to revisit and reinvent the past?
Umberto Eco famously argued in ‘Dreaming the Middle Ages’ (1987) that every era invents its own Middle Ages, projecting contemporary desires and anxieties onto an imagined past rather than recovering historical reality. (2) The continued relevance of this observation is evident in Texte zur Kunst’s recent issue on the ‘medieval turn’ and its accompanying panel discussion at Shedhalle during Zurich Art Weekend, both of which asked why artists once again turn to Gothic imagery, allegory and apocalypse. (3) Bonzon’s work certainly participates in this renewed dialogue with history, yet it resists easy categorisation. Medieval motifs coexist with cartoons, psychoanalysis, revolutionary politics and gestural abstraction, suggesting that the past functions not as an object of nostalgia but as mutable visual language, one in which the danse macabre, cartoons, revolutionary politics and psychoanalysis can coexist without hierarchy.
The layering of temporal registers extends into the sculptures. Modelled in polymer clay, coated in atomised aluminium and displayed supine on white lacquered wooden plinths, Speak back and whisper name me (dreaming Dee-Dee) and Epouvanté tut e vois reflété (dreaming SpongeBob) transform familiar cartoon characters into strangely solemn effigies. Their metallic surfaces strip away the saturated colours that once defined them, preserving them as relics of late-capitalist media culture and as vestiges of the cartoon world of the late 1990s that shaped a generation. Though the titles suggest the figures are dreaming, their rigid stillness and coffin-like supports leave them suspended between sleep and death – a distinction perhaps less fixed than it seems, given that in classical mythology sleep (Hypnos) and death (Thantos) were twin brothers. While the modelling of the sculptures mirrors the paintings’ gestural intensity, they also withdraw into stillness, their elongated bodies suggesting both repose and transformation. What ultimately connects these figures to the skeletons of dadanse macabre / tototentanz is their status as characters rather than individuals. Neither fully human nor wholly abstract, their distance from lived reality allows them to operate less as portraits than as narrative devices, carrying allegorical and symbolic meanings across Bonzon’s visual universe.
Florent Bonzon, may floréal, Plymouth Rock, 2026
Running alongside these meditations on morality is another recurring motif: fire. In paysage de feu (2026), what might initially be read as a hellish landscape or a devastating forest fire gradually reveals itself as something more ambivalent: flames become fields of restless energy, generative as they consume. This subtle shift complicates the logic of the danse macabre. Rather than dwelling on the futility of earthly existence, Bonzon’s paintings suggest renewal and the possibility of transformation rather than resignation.
Anderson’s description proves unexpectedly apt. The longer one spends with may floréal, the more its apparent excess gives way to careful structure and layered historical reflection. Bonzon’s concurrent presentation at Basel Social Club extends this mythology further: Dee-Dee and SpongeBob return, now joined by the Powerpuff Girls and Keroro, their elongated bodies upright and circling in their own danse macabre. Rather than closing the narrative, the exhibition suggests that Bonzon’s symbolic world is still unfolding and that more compelling stories are yet to be told.
Florent Bonzon, may floréal, Plymouth Rock, Manessestrasse 66, 9 May–4 July 2026.
(1) Sophie Oosterwijk, ‘Of Corpses, Constables & Kings: The Danse Macabre in Late Medieval & Renaissance Culture’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, Vol, 157, 2013, pp. 61-90
(2) Umberto Eco, ‘Dreaming the Middle Ages’ in Faith in Fakes: Essays, Secker & Warburg, London, 1987
(3) Shedhalle, ‘Past Projection Surfaces’ with Texte zur Kunst,