Hello, I'm Sonia J..

SONIA JERONIMO 1971, SERRA DA ESTRELA, PORTUGAL. My practice sits at the intersection of lived leadership, emotional intelligence, and material experimentation. After three decades building companies and leading complex structures, I transferred into painting an intelligence of scale, decision, risk, matter, and construction. My work is born from this passage between leadership, body, territory, and reconstruction. I work through abstraction to translate pressure, change, and recovery into color, rhythm, and surface—images that hold intensity without becoming aggressive. Since 2023, I’ve been investigating blue not only as a color, but as a behavior—a responsive system that changes with light, material, distance, and scale. I treat blue as an active field rather than a passive surface: it can absorb, recede, vibrate, soften edges, or sharpen contrast depending on how it is built and where it is encountered. The work is fundamentally empirical: I observe how blue shifts under warm vs. cool light, diffuse daylight vs. directional spots, and how it reads up close versus in peripheral vision at 3–8 meters. In the studio, I test how blue reacts under different conditions: warm vs. cool light, diffuse daylight vs. spot illumination; close viewing vs. peripheral vision; intimate scale vs. architectural presence. Material is part of the experiment. I work blue through gesso, modeling paste, and river sand collected from the Rio Seia, Serra da Estrela, portuguese mountain innerland, at the highest point of Continental Portugal at 1800m of altitude, allowing viscosity, grain, and absorbency to reshape the pigment’s, depth and tempo. Layering, scraping, and staining create a visible history—blue as sediment, atmosphere, and signal. This investigation is ultimately spatial. Blue alters how a room holds the body: it can expand perceived volume, slow attention, and change the sense of human presence— whether one feels anchored, exposed, calmed, or quietly confronted. I think of blue as a systemic context—where matter, light, distance, scale, architecture, and the viewer’s body form one continuous circuit. Ultimately, these works are designed for. real space. They reward close looking through texture and micro-contrast, while reading clearly from distance through stable fields and repeated movement. The paintings aim to offer a grounded atmosphere—an invitation to pause, breathe, and sense the deeper currents beneath the visible surface ARTISTIC STUDIES & INFLUENCES I built my own investigation around blue, matter, scale, and spatial experience through intensive practice, visual study, reading, material experimentation, and a relationship with architecture. My work is shaped by a serious study of artists who did not use abstraction as decoration, but as a system of presence, perception, matter, and spatial force. From Rothko, I learned that colour can become an atmospheric field — a place where the viewer does not simply look, but enters. From Pat Steir, I absorbed the intelligence of gravity, fall, water, accident, and controlled surrender. From Yves Klein, blue became more than a colour: it became an absolute, a perceptual territory, a state of intensity. From Tàpies, I understood surface as body, wall, scar, matter, and memory. From Frankenthaler, I studied absorption, transparency, and the way paint can become inseparable from the support. From Richard Serra, I take the importance of scale, weight, confrontation, and the physical relationship between artwork and architecture. From Do Ho Suh, I recognise the emotional architecture of memory, displacement, and belonging. These influences are not quotations in my work. They are structural foundations. My language emerges through large-scale blue fields, mineral surfaces, sediments, gravity, transparency, erasure, tension, and architectural presence. What my paintings reveal is not an imitation of those artists, but a personal system built from their lessons: colour as space, matter as memory, surface as territory, scale as bodily experience, and abstraction as a serious visual language capable of holding silence, force, fragility, and transformation. “I build a lineage and transform it into mineral architectural language of blue”. Sonia Jerónimo