by Sonia Martins Mateus
1 100,00 €
Sonia Martins Mateus’ Plastic Birds is made through painting bleach on black linen, where the image is revealed by removing, biting into, and transforming the surface rather than adding colour to it.
The work holds a compressed, frontal space. Pale ochre forms rise out of the dark ground, while looping, wire-like marks and a dense horizontal structure create a feeling of blockage or containment. The black remains active throughout the image, so that even the areas of light seem to carry shadow beneath them.
Across Martins Mateus’ practice, landscape is not only a place to look into, but a structure shaped by memory, territory, displacement, and material force. In Plastic Birds, that question becomes direct: the painting offers an image, but also resists entry.
Descended from a Portuguese family that had to flee Portugal for economic reasons linked to the Salazar dictatorship, and originally from the village of Perais (Beira Baixa), Sonia Martins Mateus develops work rooted in history, territory, and their memory. She is interested in the traces left by displacement, individual and collective narratives, popular cultures, and pagan mythologies.
Through her work collecting materials, documents, and testimonies, her art takes various forms—performances, drawings, textile sculptures, photographs, and landscape sculptures (installations). They appear as traces of a personal and collective history, of a culture that is both popular and universal. This work exudes a unique poetry, traversed by a tension between gentleness and brutality, an in-between space where our relationship to our origins, whether familial, geographical, or social, is replayed.
Her visual language is dry and arid, rocky and scorched. The materials she uses come from construction and domestic spaces, revealing a particular attention to what constitutes and shapes our living environments.
Influenced by the concepts of entropy and landscape, she works from the specificity of sites and their materiality. She pays close attention to the pollution of our territories, whether visual, material, or symbolic, and questions the slow or violent transformations of inhabited spaces.
Her palette is organic and primitive. Attached to black, she creates through and with it. She attacks the material using fire, acid, or bleach, in a gesture of burning and revelation. Black is bitten, transfigured, allowing other colors to emerge: ochre, shades of gray, yellows, oranges, and off-whites. Her compositions engage in a conversation with notions of space, territory, and material, organic, and architectural stratification. They question the very notion of landscape: what can be defined, what it contains, and what it produces.
Taking an interest in popular cultures and construction practices by referring to those who build—rather than those who design, finance, or orchestrate—is a way of challenging the standardization of architecture. This art of building too often excludes residents from all phases of design and construction. It is also a way of promoting a heritage other than that of the powerful: a heritage of popular practices, gestures, and customs.
