Sophie Bueno-Boutellier incorporates and merges painting, sculpture and installation in her practice. Her first solo exhibition at The Approach, ‘They sing a song only you can hear’, will present new paintings, sculpture and her first tapestries.

Bueno-Boutellier’s installations and sculptures appear minimal and intuitive through her use of few and simple artefacts, connected by voids and silences to compose loose narratives in the exhibition space. Her paintings are surface and form at once. She works on the floor from all sides of the canvas, folding, creasing and applying pigment to untreated canvas to create her paintings, which are made through a repetitive, performative process induced by the texture and qualities of the material itself.

The tapestries bear the motif of draped and folded translucent and coarse fabrics derived from closely cropped digital photos, taken of excerpts and residual offcuts in the studio. The digital photo captures the moment of this chance choreography of these objects, in turn the images on the tapestries have been re-created through the weaving of coloured threads in a traditional weaving workshop in France. Bueno-Boutellier’s translating of a digital image into a crafted object implies de-flattening what is only surface and converting pixels into material. This transition of states is circular and relates to different moments in time, echoing back and forth, rather than a fixed present moment or material form. For Bueno- Boutellier, the perception of the form and the way the objects act on each other and perform as art works, also has a relationship to human encounter and instinctive almost imperceptible movements, triggered by the presence or words of others.