“I basically stopped censoring myself, [and] this is what happened,” she said in her Los Angeles studio last week.

By “this”, Bonnet is referring to her monumental, impossible-to-mistake paintings with human bodies that are bloated, deformed and grotesque. They are ugly, and yet magnificent and compelling at the same time.

Bonnet’s singular perspective is now on show in Hong Kong. “Onslaught”, which opened on May 31 at the Gagosian gallery, is her first solo exhibition in Asia, and it includes new works that feature the absurdist human figures.

The Hong Kong paintings, including six that are hung as two triptychs, are dominated by headless torsos, huge rotund bottoms encased in pantyhose, giant, inflated “Popeye” hands, and breasts that look to be shooting out conical balloons.

Bonnet was at her workspace in Los Feliz in Los Angeles, a spacious former factory that, on the morning we spoke, had no art in it because everything had been shipped to Hong Kong.

“I treat this as a job,” she says. “I come here every day to work.”

Born in Geneva, where she graduated from art school, she moved to Los Angeles in 1994 to take a year off and brush up on her English. That year never ended. Bonnet liked the city so much she decided to stay for good, drawn to the “non-judgmental and welcoming” vibe of the city.

“Because of the geography of Geneva, you feel trapped there. There are months of a low cloud layer and fog, and can be pretty dark and oppressive. Los Angeles is open in every way.”

Bonnet was born in 1970 and grew up in the suburbs of Geneva, with her economist father and child psychologist mother. The family did not own a television, and she recalled a “very overprotected” childhood.

“There was not much to do, there wasn’t a lot of outside stimuli, so I drew all the time for entertainment,” she says.

She began as a freelance graphic designer, making “pleasing” but “boring” illustrations that could sell.

The oil paintings are anything but boring.

“My first gallerist here could see that this was something that wasn’t really around, that there was a narrative, and here’s a world that has attracted me to it,” she said. The bodies are surreal but they are about something familiar to all of us. “Usually, it’s something you can feel in your body,” she says.

Bonnet typically has a sense of what a piece will end up looking like after she’s done the first few strokes, essentially a quick sketch on paper to get the proportions right. Then she moves everything to the canvas. But she says her vision “usually changes a lot, which is why it takes so long”. (Each piece takes her about a month to complete, working all day every day.)

People who see her work have understandably mixed reactions, but Bonnet takes it all in stride, and says much of her satisfaction from her work is when it elicits whatever emotions it does.

“I want the paintings to make you feel something,” she says. “Whether it’s embarrassment, or thinking about how people hide some parts of their body or enhance other parts. Sometimes I think I don’t need to explain too much, even to myself. I don’t need to be too clear. And the intention is never to be sexy. That’s not the goal at all. If it is, that’s somehow ridiculous.”

She has seen people turn away from her paintings, not quite sure where to let the eyes land, or how they should react.

“They’re recoiling,” she said. And that is “fun and interesting”, like how people react when watching horror movies.

“I like to think that it gives people who give it enough attention a feeling that’s not very common,” she said of her art.

Her practice may yet evolve. She said she couldn’t predict where she would go next artistically. But there is no urgent need for change. As soon as she started expressing herself honestly, she also started “being happy with how things are”, she says.

“Louise Bonnet: Onslaught”, Gagosian, 7/F Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central, Tue-Sat 11am -7pm. Until Aug. 6