From the sea to the forest, by way of Paris; from rain to the zenith; from everyday objects to natural elements, Sophie Cérésa lets us savor varied atmospheres, alive with countless sensations.
Sophie Cérésa’s painting is certainly born from the contrast between the demanding intellectual life of the doctor and the intuitive life of the aesthete drawn to the great Italian masters, between formal exploration and poetic inspiration. Close to the material itself, the artist seeks purity and flirts with abstraction without ever losing herself in it, because the motif or landscape remains the subject, the support for a meditation that reaches beyond it. In Sophie Cérésa’s work, there is a seizing of the everyday that questions us and, through the language proper to this humble and spiritual painting, accompanies us in our own introspection. “Hurry to pass on your share of wonder, rebellion, and benevolence,” writes René Char 1], in his desperate quest to grasp “inexpressible life,” which he refuses to surrender to the prosaic world around him. When Sophie Cérésa plays with opposites and sets her storms against solar light, she answers the poet’s injunction and, in turn, offers her share of wonder. Her painting, which can be seen as a quest, pursues a discreet beauty: one stirred by a reality that slips away from the futile attempts of words. A deep vision, an invitation to look within when looking into the distance: this is what Sophie Cérésa’s painting conveys. The artist Born in 1959, Sophie Cérésa answered the urgency to paint after earning a doctorate in law and beginning a first career as a business lawyer. For thirty years, from her Paris studio, she has sought answers to questions that only form and color can sketch out, setting them down in paintings rather than in words. She exhibits in Paris and in the provinces, with the ever-renewed honesty of someone seeking “the secret poetry that emanates from things seen,” as the painter Truffemus wrote about her in their correspondence. Trained at the Art Student League de New York City and at Arts Déco de Paris, Sophie Cérésa is driven by the tangible relationship she maintains with matter: raw material first, since she works with vibration through successive layers of oil paint, and model-material next, since what surrounds her becomes the support for a vision in depth, beyond the glaze of appearance, in search of the emotion of the real. For thirty years, still lifes, forests, urban landscapes, and shadowy seas have nourished a body of work whose aesthetic of simplicity and revelation moves and delights.
Source: paris.fr — photo: Sophie Cérésa