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After studying history, she enrolled at ESAM Caen/Cherbourg, where she graduated with honors in 2019. After several exhibitions in France and residencies, she was awarded a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in 2022 and also created a visual and sound performance at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Caen. Following her first international exhibition, The Invisible Thread, at the AVA Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa, she was invited to perform in Bern during the summer season of 2023.
Working in Normandy in a studio at the Le Bazarnaom art factory, she develops cultural action projects with local residents in collaboration with various institutions (socio-cultural center, nursing home, National Education).
At the same time, she will return in 2025 to a part of the small South African desert for a creative and research residency, as well as for two exhibitions, DIEPE GROND / Klein Karoo National Kunst (KKNK) and FROZEN TALES/AVA Gallery/Cape Town. Invited by the Modern Art Project South Africa [MAPSA] foundation and selected for the KKNK 2026, she returned to South Africa to continue her research and creative work, this time in the heart of the great South African desert.
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.
