SOPHIA LOEB

In new works, Loeb intentionally frames light as having its own declaration and way of revealing itself. Her ‘manifesto’ unfolds through the very nature of light: as the condition that makes visibility possible, it brings all things into being. What is unseen in the darkness becomes perceptible through light’s presence, suggesting not only revelation, but also the existence of something before it is fully grasped. The title of the exhibition evokes a sense of hope, transformation and empowerment, drawing on the metaphor that the most intense challenges – the ‘darkest hour’ – often precede a moment of clarity and renewal, occurring immediately before a positive breakthrough – the ‘dawn’

In her practice Loeb answers to the true substance and matter of painting. She takes a sculptural approach to paint, building immersive fields of colour through gestural brushstrokes, oil stick marks, and hand-applied pigments, layers which are then scraped, reworked and reapplied to achieve a dense, tactile surface. Although abstract, Loeb’s compositions are rooted in place, albeit one conjured from the imagination, invoking the deep sea, glittering cosmos or mist-shrouded forests of her native Brazil. Her realms are indifferent to our preconceptions of scale, at times infinitesimal and tightly molecular in their structure, and, at others, drawing upon the sublime to harness the epic grandeur of nature’s immense beauty. In this new body of work, she takes an interest in veiling and concealment, manipulating oil sticks in shimmering, iridescent tones to create a pearlescent haze across the surface of her canvas. This ethereal luminosity bears the influence of the Neo-Impressionists, invoking their divisionist brushwork, application of pure colour and optical trickery.

Loeb’s paintings arise from a place of artistic reverie. Although ultimately an expression of her inner world, they remain profoundly corporeal, grounded in the tactility of her medium. With reference to her early sculptural practice, Loeb works with a spatial logic, turning her canvas continually and applying paint with her hands so that her paintings become an index of bodily movement. She plays with addition and subtraction, resulting in a palimpsestic surface that reveals washes of diluted paint beneath topographical undulations of ossified oil stick, the uppermost layers sealed with velvety fields of loose pigment. The interaction of diverse properties lends her painting an alchemic feeling, compounded by the impact of opposing forces in her work: as she applies each successive layer, the one below is forever lost, a dichotomous process that pits opacity and transparency against one another. Within these fields of sensation and gesture, Loeb sets loose elements of disarray, conditions that encourage visual associations with contamination. Yet ultimately her ‘manifesto of light’ carries in it a quiet sense of optimism and a forward-looking perspective, philosophies that are particularly resonant in today’s fractured world.

Courtesy Pippy Houldsworth Gallery.