Frédéric and Catherine Sofia

Thus, their common will to account for a worldview dominated by alienation and power relationship has become more explicit ; that’s why their work, while formalizing an aesthetic of tension and duality, also appears as if it was grieving for the whole idea of seduction, which underlying mechanisms would have been diverted to a steady and subtle balance of power -between humans and animals, men and women, producers and consumers.

Exuding as much elegance as bitterness, the resultant pieces could be seen as protagonists of this paradoxical game, examining and unraveling the ambivalence of the links established by humans with their environment: hybrid figurative objects stretching the boundaries of art and design and edging kitsch together with „faux naïf“. Laying claim to the „semionauts“ defined by Nicolas Bourriaud as „inventors of pathways through a landscape of signs […] whose works produce or materialize singular journeys“, Frédéric and Catherine Sofia reconfigure the totems of our consumerist civilization so as to better fix their fierce ambiguity. They therefore situate themselves at the crossroads of types and identities by multiplying levels of interpretation as well as references.

Wavering between cultural commentary, pop minimalism and borrowing from primitive arts, FC Sofia’s creations echo both Saul Steinberg’s half-enchanted half-wry caricatural ruminations, Haim Steinbach’s gleaming though caustic display shelves, Peter Halley’s tangy, decorative confinements and Tetsumi Kudo’s bio-chemical and fluorescent mutants.

Frédéric and Catherine Sofia – www.fcsofia.com