With studied lightness, Sofia Storniolo records intimate and ironic observations on sheets of paper she always carries with her, constantly moving between the urban, cosmopolitan dimension of London and the Sicily of her roots.
Sketchbooks, brown wrapping paper and notebooks become extensions of her gaze, capturing imagined scenes and impressions of everyday life in a private visual diary through a spontaneous, nomadic and everyday gesture.
The edges of the sheets can barely contain the exuberance of the reinvented and repeated forms. The precariousness of the support underscores a desire not to sacralise the artwork, allowing the drawings to reveal the unstable identities of the characters who appear in the mirror. They bend, take flight, embrace themselves.
Sofia does not seek anatomical precision or literal resemblance, but continually redefines the characters’ features. As the portraits gaze back from the mirror with a playful attitude, and bodies contract, expand and explode, transforming into hybrid, almost mythological figures, the profound connection between identity and the creative process emerges as the central element of her practice. For Sofia, it is important to follow intuition before its destination becomes clear, to build environments rather than isolated objects, and to approach art as a way of organising life.
Free from rhetorical heaviness, portraits and observations move along a delicate balance between introspection and play, inviting the viewer never to take themselves too seriously. A sense of play must be rediscovered through eyes capable of looking beyond the familiar, without fear of unsettling our faith in reality. The image reflected in the mirror is not a guarantee of truth, but rather a confirmation that identity and perception are unstable constructions.
The mirror returns an image, but it is words that give it a definitive form. They explode and bloom, claiming gestures of poetry, movements of love, a responsibility towards joy and pain. Creating works of art means depending on the presence of others and adapting to oneself within another self. And so, Sofia writes: “it takes a little patience.”
Marina Mottin
