Subject matter in painting is merely the trigger that allows the expression of something more profound, unconscious and possibly hidden even from oneself, and therefore all inclusive, so viscerally immanent to humankind R. Alonzo
Totems beyond Patriarchy May 2014
Nature has been qualified as a female organic form by most ancient cultures, but for the last millennia or so, the world has been primarily perceived and shaped by the masculine side of the species. Our recent history however has seen a trend towards a natural reversion to a feminine bias, with women becoming increasingly more crucial to all aspects of society.
These works serve to remind us about these issues and others that we continue to face the world while reinventing the female figure as an emblem for current conditions and a new Totem for the future. The juxtaposition between the representations of the animals and plants in compromised an ailing conditions and the female form that seems to swallow and revive the life- infused aspects of her creation, render a sense of hope for a future in which the maternal provides a healing force to an ailing planet.
Signs. Symbols. Sentinels February 2, 2013
The works of the present exhibition are the works done with the intention of exploring the physicality of animals, in particular as it relates to the bodies of a specific group of animals the bison, the bull, the horse etc. These are animals of our Paleolithic past. Needless to say, my intentions are to connect with our primitive and archetypical ancestry by re- articulating within our contemporary context those prehistoric images, their human bodies and their animals. Thus, these old protagonists acquire new meaning by bringing forth, I hope, the mood and emotional tone of our contemporary world, while at the same time they re- collect to whatever extent possible their ancestral meaning.
Most of my images, but not all, are of women � although many male figures, and an abundance of animals, inhabit my pictures as well. But it is woman, as earth and goddess that is the focus of my work. It is her anatomy, her biological capabilities and frailties, her distinctive pains and pleasures, her sexuality and aging, her chronic status, her tears, her peculiar psychological turns and her existential status that I attempt to capture in my paintings.
More specifically, it is the form, or rather, the multiple forms, of the human body that I depict. Naturally, as a woman native of South America, the forms, colors, textures, etc. that I take pains to create on my surfaces belong to a well known Latin American pictorial vocabulary that has roots in ancient Paleolithic forms. Building upon this tradition, I aim to create images that while connected to those �primitive� forms, are nonetheless very contemporary not only in their look, but also because they bring forth the mood and emotional tone of our complex contemporary world.
November 2003 Solo exhibit, new paintings, under the title
BACK TO BACK presented at Gallery 3,
showed some of my introspective analysis of the world at war, and its opposite, an esoteric world at peace.
In the show a series of paintings depicting abstract backs of women, mysterious, with hidden heads and emphasis on their spines. Along with these paintings, I have added excerpts from poems done by my father who was a physician and a poet in South America. I feel these fragments of his poems find their own space between each painting in the collection. I did not intend these poems to be self-referential or have any specific reference to my works. Rather, I see them as an impact from his spirit to mine
Becky R Soria
METAPHORIC TORSOS Exhibition Statement, January 2007, Solo Exhibition The Jung Center, Houston, Texas
From a Jungian perspective 3-12-2006
On the torso aspect of the images.
The back of the body is always the promise of a front, but in my work it is a front that never arrives. The mind approaches the world with its preconceptions, - can it see the back without somewhere unconsciously presuming the front --- no --- so what front is presumed
Is there a person represented by a back such as this, is it somebodys back
Is it Woman rejecting being taken as a sexual object
The back is a symbol of rejection, of turning ones back on the viewer, of looking away, but it also represents looking in the same direction as the viewer, looking at the same thing, in the distance.
The back for beasts of burden carries the material weight of the world, but for humans, the back carries the weight of the worry, the stress, the pressure, the fear, the grief, and its physiognomy tells the tale tail of the persons life.
And the back can symbolize the shadow as Jung observed,
Taking it in its deepest sense, the shadow is the invisible saurian tail that man still drags behind him. Carefully amputated, it becomes the healing serpent of the mysteries. Only monkeys parade with it.
The Integration of the Personality. 1939.
On the the abstract aspect of the images
Burying into the inchoate place where images manifest, and pure light plays against color and form, I paint my abstract images. But these abstract images many times are on the border of meaning, at the place which allows projection of content from the shadow. As Jung observes,
Projections change the world into the replica of ones own unknown face.
Aion 1955. CW 14 P.17
Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.
The Philosophical Tree 1945. In CW 13 Alchemical Studies. P.335
On the collage aspect of some of the images
A collage is a beautiful medium to allow the play of ideas as images to play against each other, to conflict, to balance, to unify, and to fracture. It is the post-modern condition to be a dynamic and unstable equilibrium of ideas about the self and the world, where the real world, if there is such a thing, is lost beneath the cascade of conflicting images purporting to represent it. And did not Jung point us towards this as well,
The individual ego could be conceived as the commander of a small army in the struggle with his environments war not infrequently on two fronts, before him the struggle for existence, in the rear the struggle against his own rebellious instinctual nature. Even to those of us who are not pessimists our existence feels more like a struggle than anything else. The state of peace is a desideratum, and when a man has found peace with himself and the world it is indeed a noteworthy event.
Analytical Psychology and Weltanschauung 1928 In CW 8 The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P.693
November 2008 presented a solo exhibit
ALCHEMY at Gallery 3. Bruce Leutwyler states
It is the quest to turn base material base flesh into spirit. But what is spirit and what is flesh really In a departure from, yet a movement forward in her investigation of the female form, Beckys new paintings may remind one who contemplates them of the unfinished sculptures in the Academia Di Belle Art Florence. The human figures in them are not so much abstracted forms, as forms coming into existence or dissolving out of existence into the primal elements that constitute them. But these elements are not the chemical elements of modern chemistry rather they are the al-chemical elements of a tradition whose wisdom was lost a long ago, and whose truth still awaits a rediscovery.
Leutwyler continues, The basic elements of the holographic simulation we call reality is really only just color... the stuff that dreams are made of. In Beckys paintings it is a dense rich color, pointing to the paradox that that stuff of which we are made, that flesh, that materia riginalis, is indeed in fact only paint, the very stuff of color. This experience of density in the color forms is what gives them such sense of reality. Yet that very density, like the illusoriness of the image we read in painting, is not real. Like the figures in her images, dense form is constantly being dissolve and reformed, brought to a rebirth and dying every instant. It is a phantasmagorical miasma that we are desperate at every instant to hold in a reasonable form .So desperate are we, that we do not notice it dissolving returning as it does in Beckys alchemical paintings into the very paint that is all it is...
October 2009. Solo exhibit INTIMACIES OF CONFLICT
Becky Sorias New Paintings are not easy works. They continue and extend her work with metaphoric works. The human protolith is subjected to the pressure of life, be it Afghan war in the painting Soldier, or, in the paining Falling, the innocent stumbles that leads to a death tumbling down stairs. it is not physical heat and pressure, of course that the human protolith is subjected to in her works. but physic pressure and and subtle energetic heat. The subtle heat in the East is known as prana, chi, or lung, whose course through the body is like the steady course of a stream that carves up a mountain. The physic pressure is that we all know and call stress and physical and physic pain
Beckys paintings melt the mindbody distinction for her bodies seem both material, and yet not material, yet surely not spiritual in the sense of bodies of light. This is not yet a being evolving to a higher place of pure light, but rather being made molten by the very same light experienced as the heat and pressure transformation. But Becky does not leave us an easy hope, for we do not know if this a process of refining to the purest metal, or bending, nay braking of the human being.
In one her latests works Male it is as if she wanted to take and MRI scan of the protolith as it metamorphosis. In these works she leaves the painting very flat, like a film or screen shot of the scan. The Male figure stands, giving the impression of having his hands in his pockets, unaware that a topographic image of the state of his body mind consciousness subtle energy body has been taken.
Slowly, slowly, Becky develops her own visual language called into being by her own experience of being a protolith. She is at the same crossroads that the West is, aware that there is much more than the normal range of experience of a western human being and so much more than the limited ontology of the truth-limiting western sciences. But how to express all of it in a way true to experience... that is the challenge she continues to take up in Intimacies of Conflict
January 8th, 2011 BODY- SURFACE - SIGN at Archway Gallery
For this exhibition Becky Soria has selected a group of works with diversely abstract female figures as well as a few small paintings from her collection of works with a �primitive approach�.
This exhibition entitled �Body, Surfaces, and Symbols� engages the viewer into the experience a variety of female narratives visually articulated not so much by abstracted forms of the female body as by primeval elemental forms � a materia originalis of dense rich color and complex textures that churn human and animal flesh.
Yet that very density, like the illusion we read in a painting, appears as not so real. Like the figures in her images, dense form is constantly being dissolved and reformed, brought to a rebirth and dying every instant.
Slowly, Slowly, Becky explores her own visual language, a language called into being by her own experiences.
PRIMITIVE June 2013
Gallery review by Virginia Anderson posted The Great God Pan is Dead
BODY TALK EL LENGUAGE DEL CUERPO July 13, 2012 by Virginia Anderson posted The Great God Pan is Dead
SIGNS. SYMBOLS. SENTINELS. February 1, 2013 Questions for Becky by Virginia Anderson
published by Virginia Anderson at The Great God Pan is Dead
2013 Included in The works that I like by Robert Boyd, art review.
2013 Critique by Lima de Greene curator of contemporary art at The Museum of Fine Arts.
2013 Modern Luxury Houston Magazine
2014 Totems beyond Patriarchy, Modern Houston, outsmart magazine, Max Harrison,Lecturas del Arte, Cochabamba, Bolivia. Unwrapping the world of Art by The Ex - Expat.
2016 Woman and her Symbols The Moon is always a female, The Jung center, Houston Must see Exhibition, Houston magazine
Notes on Becky Soria,by Virginia Anderson, Woman and her Symbols, Glass Tire, Top Seven Art openings Woman and her Symbols, Arts Hound,
20 15Essence Matt Adams, A new Body of paintings by Modern Houston magazine,
2017 Landscapes of the Goddess Within Glasstire,, Culture map, Know Yourself Becky Soria by Virginia Anderson,
2019 Seeding, Blooming, Renewal, A Closer look at Seeding, Blooming and renewal new Paintings by Becky Soria by Virginia Anderson, Art Review Becky Soria Seeding, Blooming, renewal by Art Houston magazine
2021 Consequential Journeys Embark on a study of the Human Spirit Spotlight magazine, Eight Vivid eye catching April art events no Houstonian should miss by Culture map. Inaguraccion de Exposiciones de Museos en Houston Consequential Journeys by Becky Soria, by NOTIYLTI
Becky R Soria pursued her early art training in South America studios. After immigrating to the USA, she continued her training at the Glassell School of Art and wit Fernando Casas PhD, artist and Philosopher
Sorias background in biology and medicine as well as her interest in archeology, paleontology influenced the subject matter of her paintings since 1980. They are often abstracted images with surreal allusions that suggest all manners of transformation, growth and mutation.
In the last 15 years of her career, shes has been dedicated to the exploration of the human figure, as well as that of various animals. Especially inspired by the psychological and -suggestive existential concepts of the female. The human interiorities that Soria creates are not, as one may expect, organic views. Far from it, she works with painterly textures, colors, rhythms and surfaces to depict these psychological and conceptual landscapes.
continuing with her trajectory, Soria has also immersed in the historical- mythological female roles of the past- depicting females as Goddesses, but not in a realistic or religious way, rather, showing them as an integral part of earths nature, and depicting them in a contemporary, postmodern style.
Gaias Oracle exhibited in May 12023 was about the ancestral mother Earth Gaia, Soria use the word Oracle as a forecaster or procrastinator of environmental events, her works have a sense off urgency, they are works created by a panoply of contrasting and contorting shapes that have urgent directional textures, contrasting colors, forceful linear rhythms, along side tender passages, and gentle resonances.