In light of solo exhibition The Manifesto of Light Before Dawn • 5 June – 11 July 2026
Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London

In a 1980 essay, John Berger argued for the preciousness of contemplating a field as an experience placed outside narrative time – a suspension of one's place within time, where each event perceived in the field is seen first and foremost in relation to the field itself. This immersion exercise requires taking what is seen for itself, as a self-contained existence. If one can access that level of immersion, then time and space unfold differently: an entirely new universe opens up before our eyes with room for feelings and sensations untied from the verbal articulation often needed to fit them within our own narrative. It is from this suspension of narrative time that another kind of looking becomes possible, and it is precisely this kind of looking – a practice of deep attention and sensibility – that Sophia Loeb's paintings seem to invite from the viewer.

Loeb’s paintings provoke something in line with the exercise of contemplation of the landscape that Impressionism so classically invites one to experience. In them, our attention goes to how light changes, to how distance shapes new forms, and how a closer look reveals profuse movement. Yet something about these paintings seems to differ from these predictable effects, as they are not limited to them – they achieve that as well as something more. In Sophia Loeb’s paintings, light shines differently, as their high contrast colours saturate our perception. They cause a different effect from what natural landscapes tend to do to one’s spirit, and it is precisely this ambivalence, this pull between the familiar and the estranged, that is worth dwelling on.

Grasping what this difference is about calls for a closer look at the artist and her process. Loeb works very spontaneously. None of her paintings are sketched in advance, and no next step is ever taken for granted. There is always a willingness to step into the unknown, to sit with it, and allow the work to begin from precisely that space.

Back in São Paulo, where she grew up – having trained in London – Loeb now works from a spacious studio that allows for several canvases to be distributed across various rooms. There she can move works – and move through them – in order to work on a number of paintings simultaneously. There is space to set works aside when momentary distance is needed from some, and space to take the canvases off the wall and place them horizontally whenever they call for localised attention to detail – which the artist does often, creating moments where orientation is suspended and motifs can grow and move freely in any direction as she moves the work around.

With such possibilities expanded by her new place, Loeb, who used to seek stability within the canvas by electing one dimension and mostly repeating the choice over an entire body of work, is now opting for variation, adding to her practice a level of spontaneity and intuition that crosses new frontiers. Over these varying-sized canvases go colours that she mixes herself, combining pigment, oil paint, and oil bars. A special iridescent oil bar has become a constant, bringing a gentle pearlescent finish to many of her recent compositions.

With this mix of materials, Loeb creates impasto surfaces, the application of which vary just as much, ranging from traditional paintbrushes to improvised tools, such as sculpting knives that imprint a rake-like texture onto the canvas, add ripples and rugged textures, and reveal older tones underneath. Loeb also applies paint with her fingers, a technique considered her favourite when controlling pressure proves particularly important, such as for the subtle smudging that creates the final layers of iridescent mist over her compositions – a final touch that has the effect of magic.

As colour, dimension, material, and technique take turns to change and flow freely, intuition proves Loeb’s most consistent method. Loeb works patiently, layer upon layer, countless times. “I never know in advance what the next layer is going to be like. I first need to finish one, and only then can I understand what the composition is asking for.” Out of this process, the combination of colours is unpredictable and often results in unlikely effects. A painting observed halfway through its making, for instance, can hint at a completely different palette from what the final effect will come to be. Mistake not: none of these layers are lost. The gradual and responsive process leaves its traces. Gently but steadily, they come through as remnants, glimmers of light that appear like flashes from time gone.

On the suggestion of memory, or of addressing some other time, the dream-like tone of some of these works reaffirms their unsuitability to be regarded as landscapes in the strictest sense of the term. Yet something within them continues to resonate with our instinct for orientation. They still activate our embodied recognition of landscape structures, as the compositional choices made by Loeb remain grounded in the spatial organisation of the natural world. Even though the motifs are ultimately abstract and may well be taken for what they are – swirls and streaks, grooves and blottings – their spatial organisation looks and feels instinctively recognisable. Amongst the hatching and textures, the resemblance to choppy waters or crisp foliage leads us to find in them a ground to rest upon, a sky to lie under, and fields and more fields to roam through with our imaginations.

Still, something in these landscape-like compositions always seems unnatural, or, perhaps, beyond it – something in them is super-natural. The colours that infiltrate the surface through layers that Loeb patiently builds up emanate unnatural tones and a sense of estrangement, of some sort of displacement. The world these paintings conjure is recognisable enough to draw us in, yet altered enough to unsettle – as if we are looking at the familiar from the wrong side of something, through a layer we cannot name. Something feels incoherent to our impulse for recognition.

Combined with their oneiric atmosphere, the contrasting colours carry an effect of light and darkness that is rather specific. Sometimes the overall atmosphere is that of an overshadow posed upon an otherwise bright scene; at other times it is as if tinted tones of dawn or dusk are contaminating it all. In many of the compositions, colours give away the feeling of being inverted, as if what we see is instead an after-image: the haunting shadows that our retinas retain as the effect of a light not long gone, whose trace insists; shadows that imprint our memories with the weight of an embossing.


As the contrast before our eyes takes us to what is at the back of our minds, an invitation lies before us: to unleash our subconscious and delve into these compositions with less commitment to naming the formations we see or to orienting them in a coherent narrative of space and time. There we can travel less conditioned to seek recognition with reality. The untying from conscious thought opens space to focus on presence, emotional response, and bodily states. Haptic senses ground us in the scene, inviting us to stay, browse, and feel.

Thoroughly and unpredictably built up, just like the surface of land is shaped by weathering and chance, Loeb’s impastos seem to be less landscape and more topos per se, as in standing-out relief. Like an accidented terrain that carves space for the unconscious, they welcome the unpredictable, cradle the instinctive, and invite us to venture into them, deeply and freely.

Along this journey, we come across resemblances and easy associations with the familiar, as even the most abstract paintings risk getting trapped by unspoken expectations of representation. But, unleashed from the pressure of a narrative, just as Berger suggests, the field that opens up in Loeb’s paintings is less a meadow of flowers and more a psychological terrain – a topography of the mind. With their complexities, shadows, incoherences, and contradictions, more than water, a horizon line, earthy ground, or lush vegetation, these paintings are a field of inner experience – of emotion and perception.

Borrowing Berger’s approach to the perception of fields, if we first take these paintings as a space awaiting events and immerse ourselves in it, we can then find that each of them is an event in itself. By this time, we are within the experience again – and these paintings, like a field, are a ground of presence. Before them words await, and we stand where feeling takes its first shape.



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Notes:

1. Excerpt from Field, an essay by John Berger first published in his book About Looking, 1980.
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Photography by Mark Blower and Ana Pigosso
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O Manifesto da Luz antes do Amanhecer [The Manifesto of Light Before Dawn]
5 June - 11 July 2026

Pippy Houldsworth Gallery
6 Heddon Street, London W1B 4BT

https://www.houldsworth.co.uk/exhibitions/172-sophia-loeb-o-manifesto-da-luz-antes-do-amanhecer-the/works/

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