SOPHIA VARI

After the exhibitions devoted to the artist at the gallery in 1999 and 2002 and the installation of fifteen outdoors monumental sculptures in the spring 2005 in Place Saint-Germain-des-Près, PIECE UNIQUE will be showing the last marble and bronze sculptures made by Sophia Vari, as well as a bas-relief created especially for the space of PIECE UNIQUE 4, rue Jacques Callot. In this two-dimensional work, one can find the artist’s evident volumetric concerns and the geometrical forms of her sculptures in which, with the combination of rounded elements and plane surfaces, she synthesizes the expressive qualities of the curved planes.

At PIECE UNIQUE VARIATIONS, 26-28, rue Mazarine, will be shown sculptures where the complementarity of the simple, harmonious lines and the praise of light give voice to volumes increasing the movement or the composition of the work.

This work slowly meditated, with a wide and subtle breathing, leaves us with an impression of serenity and fullness, in which the material’s truth – whether bronze or marble – fits in with the deep artist’s truth moved by her demands towards the emergence and the clarification of forms, then, towards a polychrome and almost timeless expression.

The simple and evocative, but very precise, choice of the colors gives life to the work without crushing it neither transforming it into three-dimensional paintings. On the contrary, the use of the pigments allows to increase the plane contrast and to redefine the essential volumes, giving, at the same time, a personal touch to every work by means of the color.These chromatic values assert a graphic and elegant immediacy, they do not dominate but give to the works an evocative tonality, «nostalgic» as Sophia Vari says. They are a counterpoint to the glistening patina- finely shaded from black to brown and green- of the sculpture. Patina that is a receptacle sometimes softening and sometimes awaking the light.

Product of an elaborated rigour, the work of Sophia Vari, grown at a crossroads of two cultures (Greek and Hungarian), appears sometimes spectacular but never flashy.