Biography
The difference between being an artist and try to be one to be it is the motivation that leads us to express ourselves. Intention or need?
When you face the work of Sonia Carballo (Socatoba) you have the certainty that her intention disappeared with the first stroke, to give way to the reality of being an artist. Sonia represents this artistic redoubt of not seeking for reasons to paint but instead doing it for the need of expression .She makes present her whole being by introducing her fruitful inner world.
Through painting she exists. Her art practice is non commercial, something quite uncommon to postmodern society.
The loyalty of her own style is not at the mercy of the alien taste but to her own feeling, with the consequent titanic effort of making her work visible in the complicated world of art.
Born in (1979 Badajoz) Extremadura raised in between stews and sermons of her working class parents, completed studies at the University of fine arts of Seville. Her simple origins helped her in the early years to approach art from an innocent and sentimental point of view, enriched and empowered later by her own instincts and research.
Thanks to her training and personal character in the search for references. The result, a work very little contaminated in the obvious sense, and with a marked sign of identity No reminiscences or comparative. Exacerbated curiosity and the need to almost obsessively communicate has led to a constant evolution at a personal and artistic level.
In her years of settling in Barcelona, from 2005 until today, her work has gained in depth, sophistication and maturity. Socatoba is not an aesthete in a physical sense but rather a sentimental one. Her quest is not based just on visual beauty but in the truth of the human being. The essence is in the thematic complexity of each canvas, pouring with internal conflicts, contradictions, doubts and passions of one very usual human way to hide the imperfections of the soul.
Her characters deformed, mutilated or injured squirm together as man does being aware of his own misery. In this exercise of human understanding resides the beauty of her painting style.
Sometimes she is accused of creating dark and depressive worlds, as if it was something negative. One would only have to remember painters such as Francis Bacon or Oliverio Girondo who also created raw pieces of works, having the courage to put the man in the mirror and look beyond his image. Ignoring the first impressions, her work contrasts with the vital character of the artist, if it is not a self-destructive but rather constructive manner of expression.
It is self-management of their own ghosts through the painting. As a result, her work is physical, carnal and disturbing, but above all it is sincere. A sincerity which goes beyond the piece of work and even the artist herself. Accustomed to living in a society that looks
at realities deformed by positivism filters almost childish, the viscerality in her pictures are perhaps too cutting, but also very moving.
The power of appearance does not work in this case, in the work of Socatoba nothing is what seems, it is simply what is.
Text by Laura del Amo
