The tones and textures of Beatrice Bonino’s Gallerina are imbued with tiredness – the faded, yellowing quality of things which have been handled and washed and reused over and over. On the polished concrete floor of Molitor’s basement gallery lie two low sculptures the dimensions of single mattresses, but resembling slabs of wax or soap, each thinly made up with sheets of plastic, vinyl and paper in shades of off-white and resinous translucency. On the walls, a series of perspex vitrines display compositions of folded paper and cardboard in the same monochrome tones. The mood is uneasy and restrained, somewhere between domestic and clinical; the delicate arrangement of materials in tension with their worn, grubby-seeming appearance.

In a text for a previous exhibition, Bonino shared a selection of quotes and reflections, including notes on Moyra Davey’s Index Cards: ‘She writes longingly about transformation, the intangible thing that ‘makes a picture alive and not dead’ … Remarkable constellations are no accident. It is the result of accretion.’ Bonino, too, seems invested in transformation through accretion – the kind of profound nuance produced only through careful repetition. In a number of the perspex vitrines at Molitor, a particular form appears repeatedly: a structure made from thin card and paper like a partially unfolded or refolded box, glued top-down by two flaps either side of it, its function as a container inverted, it becomes pure surface. Bonino’s decision to reiterate this structure across different works suggests a covert logic, a process of working through or towards something not necessarily articulable.

Installation view, 'Gallerina', Beatrice Bonino at Galerie Molitor, Berlin. All photos by Marjorie Brunet Plaza and courtesy Galerie Molitor

The friend I was with remarked on the prominence of formalism in so many of the exhibitions he’s seen in the last 12 months: shows that you could of course write whole essays about but at the same time they are really just about form, he said, and I wondered if I could allow the exhibition to be about nothing more than the ‘how’ of these folds – their subtle specificities – how paper folds, how a perspex edge folds, how plastic wrap folds, and so on.

In the writings of Deleuze, the concept of the fold offers a critique of typical accounts of subjectivity – those that presume a simple distinction between interiority and exteriority, appearance and essence, surface and depth. The Deleuzian fold assimilates these differences: for the fold announces that the inside is nothing more than a fold of the outside. I think again of Moyra Davey – the way her photographic works are folded, taped and mailed to their exhibition location without exterior packing, so that the creases and coloured tabs of tape become part of the final work. Through this process, utility is folded into aesthetic; they are both interior and exterior, container and contents. I read Davey’s methodology as closely connected to the anxieties she describes about how an image does or doesn’t become an artwork: that ‘intangible thing that makes a picture alive or dead.’ It’s as though letting the photographs be just photographs might not be enough – so they have to become their own systems of display and circulation too, they have to make themselves useful.

Installation view, 'Gallerina', Beatrice Bonino at Galerie Molitor, Berlin. All photos by Marjorie Brunet Plaza and courtesy Galerie Molitor

A similar interplay between form and function runs throughout Bonino’s sculptural practice, where boxes, vessels, plinths and chairs frequently test the boundaries between the uselessness of a work of art and a decorative object of use. Likewise, the figure of the gallerina summoned by the exhibition’s title is another instance where decoration and utility are folded into one another. Having worked a number of ‘gallerina’ jobs myself, the term recalls a faltering, flailing glamour. The gallerina must be the pretty face and dog’s body in one, switching seamlessly between the roles of secretary, technician, art-historian, diplomat, cleaner and whatever else. She is like Tiqqun’s Young-Girl, an identity the French collective argues is not defined by age or gender, but is rather an incorporation … prefabricated through mechanisms of marketing, control, and design within the audiovisual marketplace of information-identity exchange. More than a person, the gallerina is both an aesthetic and a function, a product of the art world’s dependency on cheap labour without compromising on optics.

I didn’t actually notice the exhibition’s title until checking the press text again after arriving home, and was at first surprised by it. But thinking back on Bonino’s works with this in mind, her varying tones of white, cream and grey attune to my memories of that low-waged, feminised work and its daily materialities: the milky translucence of bubble-wrapped paintings in dusty storage units, starchy tablecloths and the glaucous glow of a fridge stacked entirely with white wine; the sad beige of tupperware lunches eaten under storage room fluorescents; the filling and sanding of pockmarks in white, white walls. There is of course some satisfaction to be found in those kinds of menial tasks, and sometimes I did. But there is also boredom and exhaustion, and the most basic needs of a hungry, tired body can quickly come to feel ungainly, shameful under the scrutiny of bright white gallery lights. Like Bonino’s crypt-like beds with their limp plastic sheets, a gallery is not really designed to accommodate a living body. In this sense, the floor sculptures are like a sad mirage, arranging the white-grey-yellowing textures of the job (packing plastic, storage boxes, sweat-stains, nicotine) into a gallerina’s chief desire: a place to lie down, close her eyes, and sleep.

Installation view, 'Gallerina', Beatrice Bonino at Galerie Molitor, Berlin. All photos by Marjorie Brunet Plaza and courtesy Galerie Molitor

The last piece I looked at is really the first in the exhibition, though it’s somehow inconspicuous in its position facing the bottom of the stairs. It features a small striped cardboard box, unfolded to lie flat under a pane of glass and pinned to the wall by four screws. It’s unclear what the box originally contained, but on its lid is a printed image of a pink-red ribbon bow. The flattened box is set against a length of (I assume) silk, the edges of which stick out to the left and right of the glass frame, echoing the glued-down flaps of the box-sculptures in the vitrines, and again gesturing towards a refusal (or inability) to hold, to contain.

The printed image of the ribbon on the box lid is the only – or at least the most direct – mode of representation in the exhibition. It brings to mind an essay by Lisa Robertson which speculates on the fate of a pink and silver ribbon once stolen by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Upon its discovery, Rousseau blamed a housemaid, accusing her of stealing it with the intention of seducing him. The episode is recounted in his Confessions, where he describes his enduring remorse and wonders what became of the maid after she was fired. He remembers her as “not only pretty, but [with] that freshness of color only to be found among the mountains, and above all, an air of modesty and sweetness, which made it impossible to see her without affection; she was besides a good girl, virtuous, and of such strict fidelity, that every one was surprised at hearing her named.”

Picturing this housemaid, her sweet modesty – compliant and pliable – surrendering to the wrongful accusation, I think of another meaning of the word ‘fold’: to fail, to cease, to acquiesce – and I wonder if Rousseau’s description isn’t the formula for the perfect gallerina.

Beatrice Bonino, 'Senza titolo', 2024. Paper, vinyl, plexiglass, nylon, 26 x 45 x 9 cm. All photos by Marjorie Brunet Plaza and courtesy Galerie Molitor

Beatrice Bonino, 'Senza titolo', 2024. Plastic, vinyl, paper, glass, nylon, 20 x 30 cm. All photos by Marjorie Brunet Plaza and courtesy Galerie Molitor