The welcome to Sophia’s house is always a hug, followed by my attempt to embrace her two her

cats. Once affection has been established, feline Ursula threads us to the kitchen, where we pause

for the ritual question (coffee? tea?) as Ursula suggests an alternative: dinner. Standing in the kitchen, we talk of Spring, the rain, of gardens, the desire for warmer times, the moment when you have too many tomatoes. Can you even remember how good that moment feels?

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Sophia took the tomato overflow last summer and made a funky, fermented tomato paste. Her eyes flash mischievously to the fridge “do I want to see?" She brings out the container with the

condensed and transformed tomato corpses of hot, juicy days past.

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This paste is alive and I’m too scared to smell it. To smell the decay mixed with the push to growth,

to something wildly new.

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We descend to her studio.

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Every one of Sophia’s paintings in this show is rooted in a specific memory of the natural world.

Though the paintings first read as abstraction, forms start coming to the fore that you almost

recognize. As she makes her marks on canvas, the residue of life before the present moment peeps

into the foreground: mixed with the shadow of the past, the trace of a future.

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The work moves in graceful sections: I can’t help but see a giornata. A neat bundle of time, that

flows through the canvas, into the no-so-neat impermeability of forever, time, eternity.

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Sophia’s borders are intentional, they are felt. Felt in the same way one senses life (and it’s absence): the peace of an animal corpse on the side of a hiking trail, the thrill in the smell of fermented tomatoes. The layering of these borders, and the sometimes stark delineation of them through her use of black, are confident and intuitive choices.

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-Elsa Lee Bruno, 2023

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