Simone Subal is pleased to announce the opening of Sonia Almeida’s The Angle of the Sun’s Rays on Friday, February 17, 2012. This is her first solo show in New York and runs until March 25, 2012. Please join us for the opening on Friday, February 17 from 6 – 8pm.
Almeida’s most recent work continues her engagement with subtly gestural paintings. The construction of these pieces resembles the mechanisms of the printing process, emphasizing problems with image making and documentation. The works—mostly oil on plywood, but also a large tapestry—function like propositions for potential paintings and appear as if in various stages of completion: some unfinished and some overworked. As with printing, they play with layering and the restriction of certain colors.
Almeida looks closely at the artificiality of the CMYK color system and the un-reproducibility of several colors. For example, a color like violet becomes visible naturally in very specific situations, as when a rainbow appears before a darkly hued sky. In other instances, violet is a fabrication: a man made approximation that in its repetitive use throughout culture becomes normalized. Almeida plays with this strangeness, and creates work that addresses the translation of color, as with her Monochromatic Veil, with its swatches of blue and red, which would be read as they same shade of grey when printed in black and white. Almeida’s work speaks to the way information is lost in any translation, something that is assumed to be the case in language but often ignored when applied to the visual.
Almeida is deeply invested in the way paintings reveal fundamental aspects about the perception of the world. Central to the works on display is how sunlight—fundamental for sight—is essentially impossible to see as such. We only see its effects. In works like St. George and the Dragon broad iterations of readily known subjects are recognizable. The inclusion of figurative aspects allows Almeida to explore the fact that to portray a shadow, a pictorial technique that suggests shape, depth, and illusionistic space, an angle of light is presumed. She tries to physically respond to the changing conditions of light, since for Almeida, no two situations are the same. Her compositions show that the experience of sight is always contingent.
Sonia Almeida was born in 1978 in Lisbon, Portugal. She lives and works in Boston, MA. Solo exhibitions include: T293, Rome, Italy (2011); Chiado 8, Culturgest, Lisbon, Portugal (2009); Croxhapox, Gent, Belgium (2009); Art Positions (with T293), Art Basel Miami Beach, FL (2009). Group shows include: Modern Talking, Muzeul National de Arta Cluj-Napoca, Romania (2012); Painting Overall, Prague Biennale 5, Prague, Czech Republic (2011); Four Rooms, Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski, Warsaw, Poland (2011); Personal Freedom, Portugal Arte 10, Lisbon (2010); Acts Are For Actors, Southfirst Gallery, Brooklyn, New York (2010); EDP Novos Artistas, Lisbon, Portugal (2009); The Elementary Particles (Paperback Edition), Standard (OSLO), Norway (2006).
