Sophia Schama (*1966 in Sofia/Hungary, lives in Berlin) creates an almost physical dialogue with the painting. She paints, rakes, coats over, covers again… A certain tension develops from the relationship between the different colours, the monumental character and the energy of the gesture and the size of the painting – a balance is finally reached as a result of a veritable battle. Schama advances as if in a permanent campaign – she crosses out, converts, starts anew, continues without hesitation and questions everything: gesture, colour, material, saturation of the paint, effects of the surface. Nothing is left to chance, everything enters one process trying to defeat the elements.
Extremely confident and acute brushstrokes cover the paintings; they are evidence of Schama’s in-depth observation of the natural movements of plants that inspire her. She doesn’t systematise the motif but translates it into her own imagery; with her technique and gesture she is able to sharpen the identity without hardening it and to invent her own principles. Always in search of the essence of the language of painting, Schama’s compositions are coined with beauty and with the pertinence and potential of the meaning of balance and imbalance; almost like a reminiscence of Rocaille, of the movement of weight and counter-weight.
Nature is a power that is integrative towards human beings and overwhelming at the same time. In focusing on the human being as her main theme, Schama’s paintings appeal to our emotions as well as our intellect and create scenes of our potential reconciliation with nature.
She paints ceaselessly the various stadia of this attempt, secrets and the magic of life; she searches for colour, form and the conquest of the pictorial space, the motif that has already become gesture. She seeks to express the power, danger and the sublimeness of nature, its violence or its superiority. Sometimes nature appears very gentle, reconquering space that was temporarily occupied by civilisation, believing, perhaps wrongly, to be its permanent owner. Civilisation then is disabused, being easily swept off by some natural catastrophy. On the one hand, Sophia Schama’s paintings show a brilliant, magnificent and spectacular search for the essence of mankind, on the other hand they render a powerful homage to nature. The artist is trying to convince her contemporaries to abandon self-centeredness; she invites us to observe the world around us closely in order to recognise ourselves.
