At the New BONDED, Friendship Becomes the Medium in “Dos contre dos”

In Paris, a new exhibition project is placing artistic relationships at the center of the conversation. Dos contre dos, the inaugural exhibition of BONDED, brings together painters Adam Bilardi and Tom Chatenet in a presentation that explores not only the works themselves, but also the friendship that has shaped both artists over more than a decade.

A Friendship More Than a Decade in the Making

Conceived by curator and founder Mathilde Matteucci, BONDED is a new exhibition platform dedicated to celebrating intimate connections between artists. Its first chapter feels particularly fitting. Bilardi and Chatenet have known each other since their late teenage years, when they joined forces as part of a collective, navigating together the uncertainties, ambitions, and discoveries of emerging artistic life. Their friendship has endured long after the collective dissolved, becoming a quiet but persistent foundation beneath their respective practices. It is this invisible structure that Dos contre dos seeks to reveal.

The exhibition’s title French for “Back to Back”—evokes both physical support and emotional solidarity. It suggests a gesture of balance, two individuals leaning against one another while facing different directions. Throughout the exhibition, this metaphor unfolds through the artists’ distinct visual languages, where ideas of support, contact, vulnerability, and companionship emerge in unexpected ways.

While Bilardi and Chatenet share a commitment to painting, their approaches diverge dramatically. Yet rather than creating opposition, these differences generate a dynamic dialogue. Installed side by side, their works illuminate each other’s intentions and concerns, allowing viewers to move between two worlds linked by a common sensibility.

Adam Bilardi: Emotional Landscapes and Symbolic Figures

For Bilardi, painting has long served as a vehicle for emotional projection. His latest works revisit recurring subjects that have populated his practice for years: dogs, male figures, and landscapes suspended in moments of atmospheric transition. Twilight seems to linger across many of the canvases, where shifting light conditions blur distinctions between day and night, certainty and ambiguity.

The figures that inhabit Bilardi’s paintings operate as symbolic stand-ins for personal fears, desires, doubts, and fantasies. Yet something notable has changed in this recent body of work. For the first time, humans and canines occupy the same pictorial space, confronting one another, supporting one another, or appearing caught in moments of tension and hesitation. The resulting scenes are charged with psychological complexity. In marsh-like landscapes and unstable environments, emotions such as jealousy, frustration, excitement, and longing seem to surface just beneath the painted image.

What makes Bilardi’s paintings particularly compelling is their resistance to straightforward interpretation. Their titles, often resembling fragments of text messages, personal notes, or contemporary proverbs, offer tantalizing clues while withholding definitive meaning. The paintings invite projection while simultaneously protecting their secrets, creating an experience that feels deeply personal yet universally resonant.

Tom Chatenet: The Chair as Method and Motif

Across the exhibition space, Chatenet pursues an entirely different investigation. Following previous studies centered on the motif of scissors, the artist now turns his attention to one of the most familiar objects in everyday life: the chair. Yet realism is hardly the goal. Instead, the chair becomes a framework through which painting itself can be explored.

Repeated, distorted, fragmented, and reimagined, the chair functions as a point of departure rather than a destination. Chatenet uses its recognizable structure to organize space, balancing line and color, density and emptiness, texture and rhythm. The object provides viewers with an entry point, only to lead them somewhere entirely unexpected.

What emerges is a celebration of painting’s material possibilities. Chatenet treats the canvas as a site of experimentation where forms are constantly tested and transformed. The chair becomes less an object than a method a set of rules that can be stretched, manipulated, or broken. Through this process, familiar imagery gives way to compositions that are playful, surprising, and remarkably free.

Two Painters, One Shared Sensibility

The pairing of Bilardi and Chatenet reveals how two artists can arrive at radically different conclusions while sharing similar motivations. Both painters embrace ambiguity. Both use recognizable subjects as points of access before moving toward something more elusive. And both understand painting as a space where meaning is not fixed but continually negotiated between artist, artwork, and viewer.

At the heart of Dos contre dos lies a subtle proposition: friendship itself can function as a creative medium. The exhibition does not merely present two bodies of work in conversation; it demonstrates how artistic practices evolve through proximity, trust, and mutual influence. By foregrounding the relationship between the artists, Matteucci offers viewers a framework that is immediately relatable while opening deeper questions about the nature of artistic creation.

When Friendship Becomes a Creative Medium at BONDED

In an era often defined by individual authorship and personal branding, Dos contre dos reminds us that creative lives are rarely solitary. Behind every artistic journey are relationships that provide support, challenge assumptions, and make experimentation possible.

As the first chapter of BONDED, the exhibition establishes a compelling premise. It suggests that some of the most revealing stories in contemporary art may not be found within individual works alone, but in the connections that exist between artists themselves. In bringing Bilardi and Chatenet together, Dos contre dos transforms friendship into both subject and structure an invisible force made visible through paint.

The exhibition runs from June 4–19, 2026, at BONDED in Paris and is accompanied by a text from Margaux Bonopera, Head of Exhibitions at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles.