Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is pleased to present O Manifesto da Luz antes do amanhecer (The Manifesto of Light Before Dawn), Brazilian artist Sophia Loeb’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.
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.
