Trance Painting

Sophie-Gaëlle Martin, or Sofigael M., is a french artist from the Paris region - painter and illustrator - born in Boulogne-sur-Mer, on France’s Opal Coast. Her oil paintings - visual narratives blending surrealism and symbolism - are infused with pop culture and the graphic codes of the 1970s and 1980s. They explore existential anxiety and the pivotal moments that foreshadow tragedy. “Nothing will ever be the same again.” The artist captures the tipping point of intimate dramas or collective catastrophes, when reality fractures and the familiar world slips into an unknown dimension. Her work has been recognized internationally: in 2025, she was twice listed among the finalists and semi-finalists of the Tartget Painting Prize, and she also received the Certificate of Artistic Merit from the Luxembourg Art Prize twice - first in 2024 and again in December 2025. ACID-COLORED WORLDS & POP CULTURE In Sofigael M.’s paintings, lightheartedness is deceptive. Nothing explodes head-on: everything unfolds in a suspended instant, in silent tension - that hovering moment marking a point of no return. Her bittersweet graphic narratives, defined by precise linework and vivid, high-contrast colors, portray disillusioned figures whose gazes are haunted by events one senses to be tragic. Resilient, her heroines and heroes nonetheless retain - despite adversity - that brazen, sexy edge of late twentieth-century “No Future.” EXISTENTIAL VERTIGO & END(S) OF THE WORLD By confronting her characters with the collapse of the systemic or psychological structures that once sustained their alienation, Sofigael M. probes the human psyche and its search for meaning. She questions notions of science, belief, and irrationality, exploring liminal states and threshold spaces - at the edge of reality, in the cognitive gray zone between projection and perception.