MOUSSE 60 S. STEVI VEILED OR UNFURLED, LOVE-STAINED... A. BERARDINI

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3 210 VEILED OR UNFURLED, LOVE-STAINED AND SOFT, STIFF WITH COLOR: THE WORK OF SOFIA STEVI BY ANDREW BERARDINI Through my paintings and drawings I try to connect thoughts and ideas and impressions that I would not be able to describe, and that is why I compare them to dreams. There are stories inside us all. My stories are of libraries, the city, remote islands, extraterrestrial beings, homes, the sun shining through holes in a stone wall, second thoughts and third thoughts, a community that is wet and fluid in feeling and tight in love and compassion, of floating alone for days. Sofia Stevi, Celerina, August 2016, from the catalogue tell me if I am too much p universe of two, Courtesy: The Breeder, Athens p lizzie & laura, Courtesy: The Breeder, Athens p just like honey, Courtesy: The Breeder, Athens p ghost, Courtesy: The Breeder, Athens p book a / pillows (detail), Courtesy: The Breeder, Athens

4 Sofia Stevi. Tell Me if I am Too Much installation view at ALMA ZEVI, Celerina, Courtesy: the artist and ALMA ZEVI, Venice / Celerina. Photo: Joschi Herczeg

5 She suck d and suck d and suck d the more Fruits which that unknown orchard bore; She suck d until her lips were sore. Christina Rosetti, The Goblin Market (1862), quoted for Stevi s exhibition lizzie & laura at the Breeder, Athens, January 2017 Sofia Stevi, feeling weary or sick or in love. Feeling hungry, feeling honey drip on a tongue. Is it food or pleasure? Both, of course. The chance of my sick and weary body, thousands of miles from the place of my birth and adrift in an ancient land that felt like home but wasn t. But there was this bed, an invitation, a kindness for weary and sickly travelers. A wash of color. Pinks and reds, cherry juice and fresh blood. Accident and illness, love and lust, almost each and every a veil of untreated cotton, all daubed and stained and painted by Sofia Stevi. Of Athens and sometimes London, an artist I met in Greece who taught me to eat flowers. The color seeps and weeps in these veils and shrouds, the shapes bend and blur. A body here, a hand dangling out there, somewhere a pussy effloresces with a gentility that is like a dream but not a dream of course, a painting, and also much more than paintings, something literature can creep into and find a snug home. If we shadows have offended, think but this and all is mended, that you have but slumbered here, while these visions did appear, that this weak and idle theme, no more yielding but a dream, says Puck at the end of Shakespeare s A Midsummer s Night s Dream. But watch the play closely, and you know it wasn t a dream at all. And neither is this, however dreamy. Though sometimes framed, they so often blow easy in a breeze, sheets washed with the hieroglyphs of fairies, the juices of goblin fruits wiped clean from a sister s mouth, a curtain to a play that is the play, something so personal and ultimately real that these things feel like friends more than things. The way they veil and unfurl feel like letters written just for you in codes you can touch and feel but never so literally read, a typography made of gestures and forms, viscous and warm. The fluid dreams of Morris Louis and the violent glug of Willem de Kooning feel like they might want to haunt these pictures, but some mysteriously heartfelt femininity keeps them from claiming any but a friendly visitor s rights. When I started painting I was too poor or scared to go to an art supply store and start buying stretchers. So I painted on materials that I found [A friend] gave me some clothes that she didn t need any more, including some nice white cotton shirts that didn t really fit me, so I started painting on them with ink. I just wanted to try the material and I really enjoyed it A piece of fabric can be a painting but it can also be a scarf, a curtain, a blanket; it is soft to the body. Sofia Stevi interviewed by Kiriakos Spirou, July 26, 2017 Feeling sick in an art fair in Athens, I found a bed, blushing with softest pinks and dancing with black Japanese ink drawings. A book lay open on pillows a few steps away, white gloves inviting a gentle turn of the pages, a lot of it inspired by Christina Rosetti s The Goblin Market. Did I lie down? I did. Weak and weary bodies so rarely find relief in showrooms; fairs of all kinds don t trade in stillness or softness or reprieve, but only more exhilaration, more products and pageantry, more spectacle and purchase, more sights you gotta see, more heaped upon more. The disorientation like a feast or an orgy but never like enough, just good old capitalist mimicry sucking all the fun out of pagan ritual. But a bed, the bed, still a place to rest in the thrall. The sheets stiff with color, my body sank in and I closed my eyes. The fair roared and cackled through and around that tarnished jewel of an Olympic Stadium in Athens, the echo like a gym class. How long did I stay? Not as long as I wanted. I m too shy to really fall asleep at an art fair, the impropriety finally wore me down, and I stumbled up and out and back into the chatter and thrush, percussive deal-making and gossip, commentary and complaint. I wish I d been brave enough to take a nap in that painted bed, if only because I could. A bed is a perfect vehicle for these paintings. A place to sleep, to dream, to fuck, for some to work, to laze reading a forbidden novel or a poem, to stare open-eyed at the shifting shadows along a sick day s walls, to pass whispers and caresses as lovers unburden and bond lips wet with prayer, the ease in dozily ignoring all those bills, for sexual escapades too blushing and numerous (in bodies or instances? both, perhaps) to mention. The safest and most dangerous place in any old house. The sheets give warmth and soak sweat (along with any sickly or succulent fluids that flow from the bedded). Though totally fake, you almost wish some deity s dead body had really soaked the Shroud of Turin it makes the sheets of lovers and losers, the sick and the sleeping, feel almost holy for their stains. As Sofia Stevi s fabrics feel almost holy for their stains. After napping in Sofia Stevi s bed at the fair, I went to a dinner and Sofia taught me to eat flowers out of porcelain shells. She sat next to me, and her paintings hung over us, and each place setting had a painting for a napkin and a small pink sheaf of papers titled body issue with scanned marble splotched with cloudy and fruity globs of paint so thick it drop-shadowed and banana smiles and Greek ladies snapshotted with a tongue-lolling collie and a New Yorker cartoon where a roasted pig on a platter is plaintively mourned by a passerby He really shouldn t have tried eating that apple embedded in an article about Nigerian girls and women sex-trafficked into Europe. Somehow stranded in Athens, missing my flight and weeping on the stone floors of the airport for much longer than was likely dignified, I received a text from Sofia. She d heard from someone or other that I was stranded and might need a shelter for a few days until I could sort out how the hell I was to ever get home. I stayed in her boyfriend Panos s extra bed, where his children slumbered when they stayed with him. Another bed, another act of kindness and mercy. Sick with an old disease but steadied by the thrill of Athens, and a fatalism that passes for mellow optimism, I wandered for three days with Sofia and Panos, dazed and unstuck in time and place. She showed me where democracy began and told me about the poetry imprint she helped found in London, Friary Road Press, and she showed me the space she co-runs out of the apartment she grew up in Fokidos. We wandered night streets drunk with cheap wine and bought cigarette papers by the thousand from teenagers out of their backpacks. When I left, she gave me a box of pink dye. For your pinks, when you read them, she told me. Top - Solo presentation at Art Athina 2017, Athens, under the auspices of The Breeder. Courtesy: The Breeder, Athens Bottom - Not Too Much at All, 2016 (details). Courtesy: the artist and ALMA ZEVI, Venice / Celerina. Photo: Joschi Herczeg There are bodies and chance in these pictures and stories, sculptures and installations, beds and pillows and books. The chance of my weariness, the chance of this bed, the chance of the artist, Andrew Berardini is an American writer known for his work as a visual art critic and curator in Los Angeles. He has published articles and essays in publications such as Mousse, Artforum, ArtReview, Art-Agenda.