As if she were able to stand at an equidistant distance between the trance state, emotional expansion and a conscious action of explosive pictographic artillery, Sofia Mastai rehearses in each of her uncomfortable pieces the discordance and disharmony of a powerful and puzzling chord. There come together the coarse marks of the first physical burst that seems to have created that, as well as the consecutive entries of matter, color, gesture and drawing, which interweave, crash, are repelled, are transparent, and overlapped in the electrified combination of an organism in pounding identity crisis, dense, complex and elusive.

Mastai does not seem to repair neither seek shelter in the support of any genre or school, even when she could be classified in the standards of abstract expressionism, which in her specific case would be the same as confining or limiting in the logic of a determining stylistic and conceptual reason a work of art that is constantly eluding, feverish, firing up, from every regulatory classification, to reveal herself more as a phenomenon of convergence forces, and perhaps antagonistic forces, than as an aesthetic force of nature.

In fact, that escape dynamics to nowhere and to all directions at the same time seems to be the deranged structural keynote, the systematic battle drive that the artist seems to pose in her fickle reasoning on the blueprint, and thus prevents any attempt of formal reading to suggest, or demand the spectator or audience, not only the long awaited sensory or intellectual empathy, but also a sort of challenging critical coexistence. Mastai brings us face to face with the unsteady and unsettled, fleeting seduction of an attractive, sultry sensuality intensely tactile to quickly be deprived of all elegant robes and to surrender to the styptic beating of a palette in an exasperated dissonance; blazing strokes and blasted ripped open the musty swamps of color harshness, while fierce lines, offensive as slashes, intertwine like howling rashes.

At the same time, and even in the midst of this intimate world of frenzied physiology, which seems to be argued in an intense conflict with oneself, there is something that suddenly detaches from all the tense stress to surmount and fly. A sudden ethereal and spring-like fit, the happy wing beat of an unexpected lyricism; the crystalline lightning that injects balance into turbulence and turmoil and lightness in the depths.

Eduardo Stupía

At the table of colors, we open a book and Merleau-Ponty tells us: “The painter lives on fascination” We look at ourselves and agree.

In a state of fascination, Sofia says: “The only certainty is the love for the canvas,” while in a manifesto of life set countless canvases in the air, creating a floating forest in a parking lot, a concrete space where the trees will no longer be able to grow but the colors will expand. The art works hanging up in space come alive and look at us while leading us to be tangled in overlapping movements that mirror the long body of Sofia in motion.

In the house of words, the open book is still there and André Marchand tells us: “In a forest, I have felt time and again that it was not me looking at the forest. I have felt, some days, that it was the trees the ones which were looking at me, speaking to me… And I was there, just listening… I believe that the painter has to be crossed by the universe and he cannot want to cross on the universe himself… I wait until I am inwardly immersed, buried. I paint just because, perhaps to emerge.”

Margarita Garcia Faure: And if we talk about emerging, I ask you: What is the urgency that leads you to translate every minute of your life into endless canvas?

sofía mastai: There is a need to go faster than the lost time. Pictorial language arises from my death, from not being able to put my own life into words. From there, there is a specific need to do something that can be touched and looked at, something that exists and exceeds my own body. The canvas is being attacked, I tread on them, I take them to my trips, I go in and go out continuously, I express, and capture every single minute on tough surfaces. Doing is what keeps me alive, and that use of time can be observed.

margarita garcia faure: At the table of colors we open another book and David Oubiña tells us: “The promise of the cinema has always been the possibility of capturing time. That is to say: Arrest the fleeting moments, the instant runs away. However, at the same time, and this is the great paradox, this can only be done that way by fixing it, that is, by immobilizing it”.

If each trace is an instant over which you stand by in life, if each artwork is another trace of this statement, it feels that at the end of your life you will have done a million of pieces of art. Will you deliver all your minutes to the world and thus the movement of your body?

sofía mastai: Yes, and I will have lived a lot, a million of instants, the wrinkles of the passage of time, of remaining far beyond my own body. All those shall be my works of art. I am interested in the canvas, because at no moment I am inside. They are colors, stains, gestures in which they are the ones playing the leading roles. This is a team work, the canvas prepares, I suggest, the canvas suggests, I prepare. They all come together and a forest appears where the roots connect to each other to live, where the merger of all the works of art makes up a new being.

margarita garcia faure: In the flash of life, each burst lasts a second and then disappears. This forest of artwork would be something like this: a flash that lasts three days to then be again each painting an isolated instant?

sofía mastai: Yes, another forest will be remodeled, or it will be a desert, or a sea. The constant movement. Today there is a parking lot, tomorrow it will be another place. The permanence of canvas in time would be the only thing that lasts.

margarita garcia faure: You travel with your canvas, you move them to wherever you are, you are always painting. You change spaces, change your companies, but you always talk through your canvas. Do you trust colors more than words?

sofía mastai: Yes, absolutely. This is also related to the fact that I did not believe in my own word and many times in the word of others. I had been learning without being aware of that for myself and in my life that I needed to do real things. And the word is ephemeral, short-lived. That is why I choose a canvas.

Painting allows me to generate a matter language, without sound, that leaves a trace, far beyond myself, a way of communicating specifically, but at the same time this is an open communication, in which everyone understands what one wants.

Today I do not believe in the word. I do believe in doing.