Rebel skin It is through her personal techniques in perpetual evolution that Sónia Aniceto cultivates her own plastic, poetic and singular language. In his recent works, the artist surrenders to the pleasure of experimentation. In the constant search for dialogue between painting and embroidery, a new medium is invited: the "drop paper". A very fibrous paper which tames the scars and the tensions produced by the stitches. Layer after layer, the thread transforms the paper into fabrics. More organic and flexible, this new material opens the way to three-dimensionality. The needle is no longer used as a pencil but as a loom, creator of new "skins" which rebel until they extricate themselves from the paper. These works on paper then acquire a life of their own: the free point of the machine shapes its curves and folds according to the movement. The drawing adapts and the artist enjoys the randomness. His embroidered interventions on the drawn support magnify the image. Sometimes discreet, almost elusive. And at other times, ubiquitous. The machine panics and punctuates the paper with furious gesticulations, crazy curls that cover and invade the drawing. In both cases, the illusion of reality is reinforced by the tactile dimension. The graphite and oil pigments intertwine to better accommodate the rumbles of the machine. The delicacy of the drawing, the resilience of the paper, its transparencies, its thicknesses, its flexibility and its tensions build an intimate universe, all in strength and fragility. Animated by the themes of the body, childhood, place, memory and uprooting, the work of Sónia Aniceto explores the invisible territory of emotions. The body and nature are the bases of an allegorical language where the notions of intimate and collective, feelings and sensations mingle. His works evoke the turmoil associated with the search for an identity that is both lost and in the making. They showcase the tension of the relationship between desire and repulsion, between what fascinates and worries. In this clash of contrary emotions comes an imagery full of references to the History of Art, to the body, to the place, to childhood. The body is individual, fragmented, constrained. He dresses and undresses, plays with himself and merges with the paper. While the landscapes let themselves be tamed by gates and structures to the point of immobility. Shackled, he tries over the drawings, to unite the absolute and the fragment by accompanying the movement of bodies. A new, more abstract form is added to his usual lexicon of empty swimming pools, a sort of magnetic hole, a window to an elsewhere. A back-and-forth between the real and the imaginary, between conscious and unconscious, between figurative and abstract, then sets in. In this new series, a story begins, cinematographic narrations with multiple faces, in which the border between reality and imagination is abolished. And the image recreates the past… - Pauline Dantonel