The base of my work is the living matter, the human, animal or vegetable flesh because I try to reach the alive in its substance. The living matter is livened up, crossed by stories and by memoiries. It is vibrating, made of infinite strata, in a perpetual movement.
Each of its strata is a world which appears to me as I paint and that I like to investigate. In order to go in the depths of this material, it is necessary to me to question it in all its crudeness. Beyond the appearance, it so raw and rough that it would not know how to lie.
In the composition of my paintings, I try to express sensations, to exceed the strict resemblance.
The oil paint enriches this quest. The slowness of the drying acts as a revelation, something comes to light.
I attach a big importance for the craft dimension of the work. Going up a frame, tightening the painting, crushing pigments, this manual, indispensable approach, is my first contact with the subject.

“The intensity of the flesh” by Maxime Broch, 2017

From her native Argentina and through her travels in India, Sonia Lagier has held on to the colors. The chromatic intensity of her compositions has, bit by bit, become essential to their creation. Each painting can be perceived through the nuances of its pigments in their noble, even fearsome aspects. The color red is everywhere in her work; touching the smallest figure, the smallest object. This is not a violent or raw scarlet but rather a powerful garnet unveiling the sensuality of the flesh. The thick, colorful medium illuminates the canvas it is applied to, emphasizing shapes and revealing an incarnate body of work which is inexorably linked to our wildest impulses.

Sonia Lagier admires the classical masters while borrowing from modern painting. Her “Carne” series reinvigorates an extreme contemporaneousness of bovine carcasses sublimated by the drawings of Rembrandt and the color palette of Chaim Soutine. During a trip to Argentina, she photographed the daily operation of local slaughterhouses. Now back in Paris, and freed from the filter of the lens, her work exposes bare flesh painted in the heat of the moment. Is this not a flaying of her own desires, cravings, and fears in their full carnal incarnations? For Lagorda, she places nude female bodies upon the canvas, with lines of the human form oscillating between disciplined technique and the sensual expression of the dancing figure. As in all of her series, the first painting is the most figurative, and the model is captured in the most alive moment. Little by little, the lines fade and glide toward abstraction in its fullest. The brush deconstructs reality, pushing the mind to transcend representation and focus on the intensely colorful fragmented forms. Faced with these intense colors, the viewer simultaneously confronts existence, drive, and the sensuality of his or her own flesh. These narcissistic and cathartic preoccupations lead to a single question: What is the origin of this intense desire?

Exhibition catalog, text by Sandrine Pugliesi, Galerie de l’Europe, 2010

Sonia grew up between France and Argentina.
However, she does not leave this country of origin, neither the painting, nor the brushes.
It is through her paintings that comes back to us the intention of the framing.
Does the extraordinary print more the memory?
How is the eye impressed by the big and the fat?
Does the thickness of the flesh of the “Gordas” reveal the importance it represents to our mind?
Is there a relationship between the place which we occupy physically and what occupies us mentally?
Be that as it may and as a reminder, Argentina represents about 2 780 000 km2 …Five times France!