François Bonnel Brings Joyful Geometry to Maddox Gallery in London
A career change can alter an artist’s visual language as much as their subject matter. For François Bonnel, who left advertising after 25 years in 2018, that shift has led to a body of abstract paintings that balance clarity with improvisation. His forthcoming solo exhibition, “François Bonnel: The Geometry of Joy,” opens at Maddox Gallery’s Shepherd Market location in Mayfair, London, on June 4 and runs through July 2, 2026.
Bonnel, who is based in Toulouse, France, works across photography, digital media, and painting, but the new canvases place color and form at the center. The artist has said that what he values most in abstraction is its suggestive quality, and that idea is visible in works such as “Caught” (2026), where bands of color overlap and weave across the surface, hinting at depth without settling into a fixed reading. The paintings invite the eye to move, compare, and complete what the composition only proposes.
Although Bonnel’s work echoes the visual discipline of geometric and hard-edge abstraction, it resists the rigidity those terms can imply. Rectangles and squares bend, bulge, and curve, as if each shape were responding to an unseen pressure inside the frame. In “I Really Like You” (2026), a darker ground gives way to lighter forms that seem to catch illumination from an indeterminate source, adding a quiet charge to the composition. Light is not merely descriptive here; it becomes part of the painting’s structure.
That tension between order and feeling is central to Bonnel’s practice. He describes his work as an effort to create balance and joy through images that are “simple yet evocative,” and that sensibility carries the imprint of his former life in visual communication. The paintings are direct, but not blunt; legible, but never closed.
At a moment when abstraction continues to absorb influences from design, digital culture, and personal narrative, Bonnel’s exhibition offers a concise reminder that geometry can still carry emotion. In his hands, shape becomes a vehicle for intuition, and precision leaves room for pleasure.
