Sofia Stevi

Stevi’s storytelling encompasses painting, sculpture and book-making, often using raw un-stretched fabric to create large scale paintings that act as portals to the realm in between reality and dreams. We naturally associate painting with an attempt to fix a moment in time, yet the world of Stevi’s paintings is, like our own, in a constant state of becoming. This “liveliness” is expressed in its materials as much as its subject matter:

Stevi stains her nearly translucent cotton fabric with a heavily diluted gouache, generating blooms that can only partially be anticipated, and then paints over it in India ink and acrylic. There is no cartoon or preparatory sketch: one shape suggests another, and so the story unfolds not according to a preordained scheme but in response to the properties that emerge through the unpredictable interaction of disparate materials and ideas.

In her work, representations of objects and patterns representing memory coexist with everyday life, feminine figures representing the human state synchronise with unattached, self-ruling limbs, resulting in compositions whose narratives are enigmatic and often broken. Moving between the real and imaginary, the works create narratives of sensual worlds and dreamlike states that even though they start as personal representations of the artist’s thoughts and desires they end up becoming common and familiar.