Born in 1962 at Annecy, Dominique Bonneval studies fine art at Angouleme, at Poitier and at Angers where she graduated in 1988.  Meeting Jean-Pierre Pincemin, her professor at Poitier was particularly significant. Her style of painting will confirm her taste for pre Renaissance masterpieces for most of the XXth Century.  

She prefers paintings where the notions of perspective and space are absent.  Her work is influenced by a great number of American painters such as Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell.  Equally affected by Matisse, Picasso, Bonnard and Poliakoff or even artists from the COBRA movement (Jorn, Alechinsky, etc), she develops her taste for colour and pattern.  Artists such as Rouan, Basquiat, Francois Dillasser or Gérard Titus-Carmel  - to name but a few – mark out her path.



















Colour is without a doubt her strongest motor.  She works essentially on paper which she then arranges onto canvas. She paints on solid Kraft, on the floor, on her knees for hours.  This position allows her to better control her painting and to have a physical rapport with her work.  So these works, hung vertically, are created horizontally so as to be closer to the earth and the roots from which they were inspired.
Dominique Bonneval often adapts existing drawings, representations, cartoons, sketches of sculptures, Katchinas dolls and fragments of paintings.  She has also made ‘drawings’ with sticks that she used as stencils, using African motifs, leaves off trees….
Outside of painting, she participated in the restoration of frescos between 1988 and 1990, from conception to realization of decors for Lucie Lom - an agency of graphic designers and stage designers in Angers between 1990 and 1995 -, and regularly since 1987 has animated workshops (painting, printing, volume, mosaique) courses for adults and children within associations or schools.
“The artists offers, writes Jacques Maisonnier (Galerie 39, where the artist exhibited in 2012), paintings rich and sensitive where a multitude of signs and shapes blur gently and harmoniously within colours and their subtle shades. But behind this deceptive impression of frivolity she reveals, carefully thought-out, complex work and unwinds a path of great humanity that defines her, in which the intimate is revealed with modesty.”
“When an frail and temporary balance is reached, when the paintings holds itself, then I find here-and-there objects, signs, pieces of the world that surround me, birds, trees, huts, bits of garden, fences or paths, maps, to make little worlds organized in a certain way and certainly organized for each pictures” says Dominique Bonneval.
She regularly exhibits, solo exhibitions or collectively.  Dominique Bonneval lives and works at Velluire since 1996 in South Vendee.