Wall Works

"Sedimentações" (Sedimentation)

Aluminum plate, stoneware in various colours, fired at 1200 ºC in a firewood kiln. 2018

300 × 100 × 7 cm

As in previous works, Sofia Beça uses a triptych structure. Three squares. Placed in a sequence, these create a panorama. The squares speak of stillness. Their sequence speaks of movement. The colour strategy invites the eye to run across the triptych from left to right, starting from below, where yellow drives a mass of white, or metamorphosing whites, which, as if pushed by a tectonic pressure, overflow in the last square, filling it and ascending, as they become contaminated with sky blues and fire reds, then unsuccessfully attempting to return, from the upper right corner in the opposite direction, although managing to throw a reddish tongue that violently charges the black. That black, which initially seemed like a simple background under which that first yellow was pulsating, now appears to be a living force. Because everything flows in this work, which is so specifically ceramic and, on the other hand, so close to a painting, the stoneware slabs, which are a very dear material for this artist, function as brushstrokes, as quanta of force, with a life of their own. The title itself poses a paradox. Sedimentation is but an image of a tumultuous but ever-so-slow movement, unconcerned with the time of men, but nevertheless real, unlike the vanities of the world.

Alejandro Ratia

Art critic / Writer

"You are my wave"

Stoneware in various colours, fired at 1150 ºC in a firewood kiln. 2010

200 × 130 × 5 cm

Who knows the passage of Sofia Beça will not have doubts that this work is resulted of years of experience - of the wisdom acquired relatively to the ways and the tools that it uses, on the other hand, and the lived or existential experience that allows it to arrive where if it finds today.

Sofia Beça dedicated and has demonstrated, through the materializações of its imaginary one, that she is specialist in ceramics - this is its half privileged one of artistic expression independently of the denomination of its formalizações. tile objectos, relives, panels, sculptures or installations.

Of its diverse passage moments are part that in go supplying elements concerning its process and of estimated its.

In You are my wave, 2010, feel a will and necessity of the author of not confining itself to a contained space; a species of release through the continuity idea. Its real measures (200 × 130 × 10 cm) seem to leave to have relevance for the fact of terms the sensation or the pursuing desire stops exactly beyond itself - we can compare with a photograph or a painting of a landscape that leaving of being a clipping/I do not break up allow-in seeing them beyond and stops beyond.

In this way, the poetical express in You are my wave implies, simultaneously, our physical approach and distanciamento, allow-in the different levels of perception, distinct enjoyment and, consequentemente, sensations.

Keeping the manufacturação and repetition of gestures that characterize its process of materialization based on automatism quotidianos, but becoming free of a supposed conditional illustration and formalização, these more recent works of Sofia Beça are permeáveis to the free interpretation not if closing in itself same and for this reason if they perhaps fit in a new chapter of its artistic experience.

Rute Rosas

Plastic Artist

Professor / Doctor of sculpture at the School of Fine Arts in Porto