Sophie Varin
Liste Year
Year of Birth
Country of Birth
Presented by
2022
1993
France
Sultana
Sophie Varin was born in France in 1993. After growing up between the countryside and Paris, she got her BA from the National Fine Art School of Paris, then studied at Hunter College School of Fine Art in New York and finally graduated from her MFA at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. She now lives and works between Brussels and Paris. Sophie Varin’s paintings and sculptures focus on our relation to reality, and how it often means a negotiation between what you would like to see, and what you would like to hide. Depicting seemingly banal situations, her works create ambiguous scenarios where apparent familiarity shows a twisted face. Very interested in abilities to adapt and mimicry techniques, she likes to think of her subject’s capacity to understand -or fail to- its context. Her works give a great importance to the gaze of the observer, the witness, the public. Especially how curiosity, desire or fantasy have the ability to modulate what is seen. This distorted gaze, too thirsty to remain rational, is projecting so many blurred scenarios onto the real. Among others, she has had recent solo exhibitions at Fortnight Institute (New York City), 12.26 West (Los Angeles), Brooke Benington (London) and with feeelings in Brussels.
"I think that the narrative -or experience- of this exhibition could be that of plots in hollow. In a blurred mist, the beginning and outcome of actions are missing. They seem to be in progress but their unfolding or their purpose remain difficult to identify precisely. It is up to the witness to fill in the gaps in a situation that seems to be neither right nor wrong and whose investigation seems to be neither true nor false.
It has been said that the approximation of language creates doubtful truths. It has also been said that reality includes elements that are sufficiently vague to generate de facto approximate representations. This leaves us, in a vacuum, with all the things, both of language and of reality, that are simultaneously (and interdependently) true and false, right and wrong, appeared and disappeared.
Are there things that are true because they are false?
One can voluntarily accept this vagueness, these non-contradictory ambiguities. This naturally projects towards a form of positively desperate quest. This is the quest we are talking about.”
