Sofia Mitsola: Evil Eye Online Viewing Room

Pilar Corrias is pleased to present Sofia Mitsola: Evil Eye, an online presentation featuring six new paintings by the artist that explore ideas around what it means to take control of one’s body. Mitsola's protagonists expose their bare bodies to the viewer whilst performing acts of self-pleasuring. Symbols of power and protection found in ancient greek art like the phallus, lions, sphinxes and Medusas surround the nudes while they stare back at the viewer entering into a game of looking and looking back, a game that the figures are in control of.

For Mitsola everything starts from drawing. This can be sketching, mark-making, writing down thoughts, and words. Once something is set on paper it cannot be forgotten in her mind. Using charcoal drawings as a way to loosen her hand and lines, she gets to understand the forms of her figures and the synthesis. Through this process she is memorising the gesture and rhythm which is then applied to the canvas. Her paintings are about confrontation, power and control, and through the physical act of painting she is performing for her figures in the same way as they will perform for her. She gives them confidence and power to subvert the dynamics of gazing between the nude and the viewer. 

With references from mythology, Japanese animation and pornography she shows her figures longing, fantasying, touching themselves, climaxing and glowing. The motifs of sphinxes and medusas, which in her earlier paintings were the central subject matter, have now become a background supportive system that protect her figures, taking the form of intertwined hair, snakes, and feline tails. For Mitsola her figures are reclining nudes with multiple perspectives. In this new body of work she is exploring the experiences of the body, what means to be looked at and what it means to explore the female form from within.