sonia aniceto

Throughout her career, Sonia Aniceto has continued to form her own singular visual language, which is constantly evolving through her personal creative process, combining materials and techniques to create her own poetic, imaginative and inventive world.

In her recent works, she has abandoned herself to the pleasures of experimentation. The constant play between painting and embroidery fuses together to create a new medium - ‘drop paper’. She works on a fibrous paper which tames the scars and tension created by the stitching, layer after layer, the yarn transforms paper into fabric. Being more organic and flexible’ this new material lends itself to three-dimensional form. The needle is no longer used as a pencil but more as a loom, creating a new ‘skin’ which rebels until it pulls itself away from the paper. Aniceto’s works on paper form a life of their own; shapes, curves and forms appear, performed by the movement of the free machine embroidery.

The artist allows work to grow and adapt in a random manner, her embroidered interventions on the drawn support magnify the image, sometimes discreetly, almost elusively. At other times, quite evasively, the machine goes into a panic, punctuating the paper with frenzied gesticulations, crazy curls that cover and invade the drawing. In both cases, the illusion of reality is reinforced by the tactile dimension. The graphite pencil and oil pigments intertwine to better accommodate the rumblings of the machine. The delicacy of the drawing, the resilience of the paper, transparency, thickness, flexibility and tensions build a universe of intimacy, combined in both strength and fragility.

Aniceto’s work explores the invisible territory of emotions inspired by an embedded fascination with the body, childhood, places, memory and uprooting. The body and nature form an allegorical language where notions of intimacy and the mass, feelings and sensations intertwine.

Her work evokes the uncertainty of trying to find or form an identity, at times either or both lost and in the making. It shows the tension in the relationship between desire and repulsion, between what fascinates and torments. Within this turbulence of contradicting emotions’ comes an image charged with references to the History of Art, the body, the space and childhood.

The body is singled out, fragmented and constrained, dressed and undressed, it toys and merges with the paper. While the landscapes are tamed until they become immobile, by grids and structures

In this new series leading from her previous and hallmark of empty swimming pools, a new dimension has formed, a sort of magnetic hole, a passage to elsewhere, the theme is a little more abstract. It levitates between conscious and unconscious, between figurative and abstract. Like the start of a new period or story, multi-faceted characters are formed characters and boundaries between fact and fiction are blurred or abolished.

…and the image recreates the past…

Pauline Dantonel, November 2019

Translation from french : Helen Beck