A painting of a girl staring out of the frame, with a background and pink flowers suspended. It's an uncanny and surreal painting by Sofía Ruiz, showing at Galería Matices.
February 1, 2025 0 Costa Rica, Artist Spotlight, Contemporary art, Exhibition Belinda
Title image: Sofía Ruiz | Fábula | Oil on canvas | 61 x 61 cm, 24 x 24 in.

Fábula

Sofía Ruiz at Galería Matices, Escazú Country Club

Sofía Ruiz presents her latest exhibition, Fábula, at Galería Matices within the Escazú Country Club. Opening on 4 February 2025, the show features 14 paintings created between 2014 and 2024, marking a decade of development. The works present private, interior worlds inhabited by peculiar figures and uncanny objects, revealing an intricate exploration of memory, detachment, and childhood perception.

Private Fiction 

Sofía’s work permeates an oneiric quality, her subjects suspended in states of quiet unease. The compositions juxtapose soft, delicate textures with unsettling, animate forms—elongated limbs, unblinking eyes, and hybrid creatures that hover between the familiar and the unknown.

A recurring motif in her work is the solitary child, depicted with an intense, unflinching gaze. The children are often surrounded by surreal companions—animals that seem sentient beyond nature’s logic, objects imbued with implicit histories. In the title painting for the show "Fábula", a Sofía depicts a girl sitting against a background of lush greenery and floating flowers, clutching a small, cracked pumpkin. Her stare is piercing, yet the atmosphere is ambiguous. A cat with glinting orange eyes lurks in the shadows, its expression unreadable, while a rabbit-like creature stares ahead with one eye askew. There is a composure to the scene, yet the longer one lingers, the more the equilibrium feels disturbed.

A painting of a girl staring out of the frame, with a background and pink flowers suspended. It's an uncanny and surreal painting by Sofía Ruiz, showing at Galería Matices.

Sofía Ruiz, Fábula, Oil on canvas

Fragmented Memories and Disjointed Bonds

Sofía’s paintings suggest childhood recollections that are incomplete, as if assembled from fragmented dreams or half-remembered conversations. The familial units she presents are neither intact nor reassuring; figures are placed together yet seem emotionally distant, their relationships unresolved.

Raised amidst her mother’s amnesia and her grandmother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s, Sofía experienced early encounters with the instability of identity. She recalls the sensation of being unrecognised, of familial roles shifting unpredictably.

In September 2024, Sofía was awarded The Best Overseas Artist Prize at the 7th Annual Women’s Emerging Artist Award in London, UK, for “Mysterious Allies”, which will be on display in Fábula. In “Mysterious Allies”, a girl with pale pink hair clutches a toy-like creature with exaggerated features, its large, round eyes staring outward.

A painting of a young girl with pink hair, wearing a white shirt, stares out of the frame with childlike, surreal characters behind her. A painting by Sofía Ruiz on show at Galería Matices.

Sofía Ruiz, Mysterious Allies, Oil on canvas

Behind her, an animal with the face of a lamb and the body of an unknown beast presses its mouth to her ear as if whispering an indecipherable secret. The setting appears almost theatrical, a collection of strange figures arranged within a confined space, caught between childhood fantasy and subconscious disquiet.

The Imperfection of the Real

Despite their meticulous execution, Sofía’s paintings never aim for polished realism. Textures are rendered with care, yet distortions intrude—eyes that are too round, hands that seem to hover rather than rest, creatures with expressions too knowing for their nature. This deliberate deviation from realism invite reflection on what is unseen, omitted, or remembered inaccurately.

A painting of a young girl in a powder blue dress staring out of the frame with surreal, childlike animals around her.

Sofía Ruiz, Lady Bird, Oil on canvas

In "Lady Bird", a girl in a powder-blue dress sits against a sepia-toned background, a small black bird resting in her hands. Around her, creatures loom—a white bird with a pointed beak perches on a stone-like structure, an animal with luminous fur watches from the periphery, and a deer-like figure with an elongated muzzle leans in from behind. There is no overt distress, yet the tension is palpable. Ruiz does not force a narrative; rather, she offers a setting rich with suggestion.

International Acclaim

Sofía has exhibited widely, with her work featured at the Museum of Costa Rican Art in San José, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and, in 2024, at the European Museum of Modern Art in Barcelona.

Beyond institutional validation, Ruiz’s paintings have resonated with collectors and critics. Her ability to evoke memory and psychological complexity through meticulously constructed compositions has established her as a significant figure within contemporary Latin American art.

MÍRAME Fine Art represents her work, and is honoured to help broaden her visibility beyond Costa Rica, situating her within a global dialogue on contemporary surrealist tendencies.

An Invitation to Galería Matices

Fábula is an exhibition that unsettles as much as it invites contemplation. It suggests that childhood, often idealised, carries within it moments of isolation, incomplete understanding, and strange affinities with the imagined. Sofía does not depict nostalgia in its usual form but rather acknowledges the gaps in recollection, the fictions we construct to make sense of early experience.

The show at Galería Matices runs from 4 February through March 2025, offering viewers the opportunity to engage with Ruiz’s intricate, deeply personal vision. For those drawn to painting that balances the real and the subconscious, her work provides an arresting encounter with the complexity of remembrance and the unfinished nature of identity.


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Galería Matices | Escazu Country Club, San José

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