Blouin Division is pleased to present Sofia Berger’s A structure is for holding in the Toronto Project Space.
The exhibition begins with an attempt to make an intangible experience tangible, giving shape to the space between seeing and understanding.
Berger’s paintings unfold through the movement of the eye, a blink, a shift, a visual slippage. Thin skins of transparent paint gather into layers, allowing light to pass through, reflect, and fracture. Forms emerge and dissolve at once. Paint is marshalled but never fully controlled, producing spaces that feel architectural yet unstable: walls, cavities, thresholds, openings.
Here, the ocular lens becomes a door. The painting becomes a portal, a structure that can be entered by the eye and inhabited by the mind. Openings invite arrival while simultaneously obstructing it. Familiar forms offer orientation only to unsettle it again.
Berger’s spaces hold no fixed identity. They are receptacles for becoming, places where perception, memory, and the body can briefly meet. In this sense, the paintings echo Bernard Tschumi’s chora, architecture understood not as a prescription for action, but as a space in which something might occur.
Drawing from experiences of visual instability, migration, and the limitations of the physical self, Berger asks how we find our way when sight falters. What might allow a space to become real? What does it mean to enter something we cannot fully see?
The paintings hold open these questions.
They ask the eye to wander, the body to imagine, and the unknown to enter.
