In Bathos, the artist riffs on the humdrum nature of artistic life to point to its lack of heroism
In using the title Bathos, Sofia Defino Leiby seems more than ready to set her own exhibition up for a fall. Often confused with pathos, a quality that triggers an emotional response, bathos describes a literary device conveying thwarted expectations or anticlimax – when something doesn’t turn out quite right, and when said anticlimax is put to comic effect. Using this reference to frame 11 small paintings, prints and mixed-media works, the US-born, Berlin-based Leiby seems to imply that we shouldn’t take her second exhibition at Sweetwater too seriously; that being let down is in fact the whole point.
But what, specifically, is the anticlimax here? One clue lies in Bathos’s subject matter, and mode of working, which takes from the more-or-less humdrum artistic life. Across the show, Leiby points to its distinct lack of heroism. Case in point, the wry Happier than Ever (all works 2024), with its series of grey, beige and teal oil streaks converging on a central point. Painted on antique linen discoloured by time, its surface sags back to reveal the outline of the stretcher, creating another internal rectangle. There is something quietly comical, almost slapstick, about how this framing has failed.
In a number of these works, Leiby uses the 3D modelling program Blender to depict the everyday practice of painting. She does this quite directly, by creating models of the various tools traditionally involved – normal things like bottles of linseed oil alongside other clear bottles – and then printing them onto paper. In The Ground is Still Wet, but I Never See it Rain, a digital representation of these objects is overlaid atop a wider painted canvas. In other works, including Still Life with Bottles IV, the digital objects seem to arise from a grey contextless space. They have a strange relationship to light, almost appearing to emanate rather than reflect it. In their digital reconstruction, these uncanny still lifes imply the format’s ill-fit with life as it’s now lived, as if the end product could never really justify the increasingly complex process leading to it.
Throughout the exhibition, Leiby frequently makes use of everyday found materials like old advertisements, images and bits of newspaper, alongside more painterly media like oils and acrylics. The mixed-media 10.08.23, for example, combines scraps of newspaper and a photo of birds on top of a painted piece of wood. Amid this gathering is a flat shard of paper, painted in deep blues, purples and white, that seems to both sit atop and curl around one of the birds. The bird image hints at movement and a kind of natural dynamism, which seems upended by the tantalising but blunt painterly gesture on top of it.
In Bathos, the painterly gesture often feels intentionally misplaced, even excessive. In Untitled, shellac, thick and syrupy atop layers of an old novel, a Dior ad and a photo of cats, crawls up the righthand side of a wooden board. Elsewhere, in what is probably the most straightforwardly figurative work, Tarts shows a hazy group of powder-pink and lilac cakes rendered in flat daubs of paint. It’s hard to determine from which angle the tarts have been painted, in what might be a nod to the wonky perspective of Cézanne’s iconic still lifes. Here, as elsewhere in Bathos, the everyday life of painting is deflated and oddly comic. But that, thankfully, doesn’t mean that it stops.
Bathos at Sweetwater, Berlin, 6 June – 27 July
