Statement
The bittersweet worlds of Sofigael M.
Narrative Figuration • Surrealism • Symbolism
In the lineage of narrative figuration, the oil paintings of Sophie-Gaëlle Martin, social critiques infused with dark humor, draw on pop culture and the graphic codes of the 1970s–1980s.
Through surreal scenes of deceptive lightness, the artist gives form to existential anxiety and depicts the liminal state — the suspended moment and the unconsciousness that surround tragedies.
She captures the tipping point of intimate dramas or collective catastrophes, when reality begins to fracture and the familiar world slips toward an unknown dimension.
Pop Culture
A child of Generation X, Sofigael M. grew up during the height of the Disco, New Wave, and Punk movements, to the soundtrack of The Supremes, The Alan Parsons Project, Depeche Mode, Blondie, and David Bowie.
Her youth was shaped by reading speculative novels from the science fiction collection Présence du Futur, and by the imagery of the early films of Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter, and Robert Zemeckis.
These musical, literary, and cinematic influences feed her compositions, rich in symbols, with vivid, tangy and contrasting colors, typical of pop culture and the design of the 1970s and 1980s.
![La traversée du désert [American dream] • Sofigael M. 2025 • Huile sur lin](https://www.sofigael-m.art/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/La-traversee-du-desert-American-Dream-Sofigael-M-2025-1-scaled.webp)
Tangy worlds on the Edge
In her bittersweet graphic narratives, Sophie-Gaëlle Martin portrays disillusioned characters whose gazes are haunted by events one senses to be tragic.
Resilient, her heroines and heroes nonetheless always display, despite adversity, that indefinable touch of insolent and sexy “No Future” spirit of the late 20th century.
Existential Vertigo & Ends of Worlds
Our world is shattering; danger is here, catastrophe is imminent, tragedy is brewing. We are on the verge of slipping into the unknown.
“Nothing will ever be the same again.”
By confronting her characters with the collapse of the systemic or psychological structures that kept them in a certain state of alienation, Sophie-Gaëlle Martin probes the human psyche and its search for meaning.
She questions the notions of science, belief, and the irrational, exploring threshold states and cognitive liminal spaces, at the edge of reality, in the gray zone between projection and the perception of reality.
Extrasolar utopias
In the series Les Utopies extrasolaires, and the sub-series Nebula Bay, Sofigael M. explores dystopian universes inspired by science fiction and cosmology, a kind of contemporary Twilight Zone, where exoticism is merely a deceptive backdrop, hiding the disaster that simmers beneath.
Ecology — climate change, droughts, disappearing bees, storms, and tsunamis — forms the thematic core. From scene to scene, the narrative of a world caught on the brink of environmental catastrophes unfolds.
Fractals under surreal constraints
In her new series, Fractales sous contraintes surréalistes, it is a return to Earth - an Earth gone off the rails, populated by tormented figures.
Sophie-Gaëlle Martin explores the human condition and depicts the existential hell of characters on the brink of breaking point, mired in repetitive daily routines and subjected to absurd constraints.
Tortured, unstable tightrope walkers, suspended between two worlds, these beings ultimately cross the line and tip over into an alternative reality.
This series, dominated by blue, a deceptively calm blue, infiltrated with red and charged with a latent violence ready to erupt, turns the house and domestic spaces (kitchen, living room, bathroom, garden…) into a territory of tension where reality ultimately begins to waver, in step with the drift of human beings.