Share this
Sophie-Yen Bretez (Vietnam b. 1994) is a French self-taught artist currently living in Paris. Originally from Vietnam, Bretez moved to France when she was 4 years old, providing her with a rich fusion of cultural heritage. After completing a master’s degree at Neoma Business School in Rouen, France, in 2018, Bretez held multiple management positions in the creative industries throughout Paris. In 2022, Bretez decided to pursue her passion for art and began creating full-time.
Rooting her artistic practice in self-awareness, Bretez is inspired by the freedom found in observing her own experiences. The interplay of warm and cool tones, the harmonious contradictions in color and composition coexist with the aesthetic beauty of form. While beneath the beauty and harmony, Bretez unveils that the essence is also one of pain, darkness, and sorrow.
Bretez confronts themes of the human condition and the complexity of emotions while exploring the rich plurality of her identity as an adopted French-Asian woman. Building upon her signature style of dream-like surrealist figuration, Bretez’s works dive deep into issues such as trauma, resilience, identity, intimacy, and empowerment. Focusing on discovering ways in which to mirror the human condition in a state of recovery, Bretez often includes an illuminated horizon line, stating, “I paint horizons for those who have suffered. They symbolize the Possible and the Elsewhere.”
Bretez utilizes reverse voyeurism to challenge our societal relationship with the naked female body and create distance between her characters and the viewer. Unfaltering and strong, the women in Bretez’s paintings look directly out at the spectator, serving to prove they are not at the viewer’s disposal; rather, they assert control of their own bodies.
A natural storyteller, Bretez accompanies each painting with a poem to incorporate an additional layer of dialogue between the work, the viewer, and herself. Messages of hope and perseverance permeate Bretez’s work as she seeks to provide strength in the face of vulnerability.
Profile picture by: Dorian Prost
Hi Sophie! It’s a pleasure to sit down with you! First question that I always ask. How does a regular day look like for you in Paris?
I’m not by nature a morning person, but over the last few months, having lots of projects, I’ve had to put myself through a discipline and commitment similar to that of an athlete: I get up early in the morning, drink my milky coffee, take a shower, and then for 20 minutes write down in my diary whatever comes into my head: a memory, a feeling, a thought. I then cycle to my art studio and work until very late at night. When I come back home, I read, write again and take the time to cook (it’s a very important part for me), and I deal with all the tasks on the periphery of my activity as an artist (when I’m brave enough). And when I have a bit of time, I sometimes sleep at night. 🙂
I’m curious. Growing up, what kind of kid were you, what did you enjoy doing and how did you spend your time?
I’d say I was a hyperactive, slightly precocious little girl who spent her time reading, dancing, playing music, practicing sport, and creating clothes. I was an ambitious and curious little girl, very perfectionist in everything I did at school and in my hobbies. As I grew up, I became more and more knowledge-hungry. I remember asking my mother to get private lessons in philosophy so that I could get answers to my questions or I remember that time in my college when they had to make me a tailor-made timetable because I was the only student in the college who wanted to learn Latin, English, Spanish and German in the same year. I don’t even know how I found the time/energy and what deeply motivated me to do all that. That kind of not-so-much child.
My precocity made me feel out of step with children my age. I think that’s why I took refuge in painting. I created my own world in the art studio I had in my parents’ house. I was lucky enough to have my mother who always supported my artistic and intellectual appetite. She recently read me a comment from my teacher in my first year of school when I arrived in France at age of 4: “Sophie has very good taste with color, makes very nice drawings“. It made me smile as I had long forgotten the child I was. Remembering that helped me to understand and accept who I am today as a woman and as an artist.
Coming from a Vietnamese background, how has that influenced you and your artistic practice?
My Vietnamese origins and in particular my adoption by French parents influence my practice because of the existential and political questions that adoption raises. Like many immigrants, there is this feeling of in-betweenness, this feeling to be between two shores, the desire to find one’s place, the acceptance of not having only one. This feeling is all the more present among transracial adoptees because they are the highest level of assimilation in the sense that the adoptees are both identical to their white peers in terms of their education/culture and at the same time different in terms of their physique. Perhaps this is why the characters in my paintings do not have a directly identifiable Asian physique?
The theme that deeply drives my practice is the search for identity in the sense of a stable and anchored element that constitutes who we are as individuals. Growing up without knowing my real date of birth, who my biological father was and all the things that make up the beginning of a fixed identity, I felt I needed a way to express/build my identity. That’s why I chose narrative identity as a way of constructing my identity. By narrative identity I mean: a way of constituting who we are by the way we tell our stories to others. We make sense of the events and occurrences in our lives through story-telling, by weaving them into a coherent narrative, making ourselves the protagonists and assigning some supporting roles, and many extras.
So when did you start to paint, and when did you start taking being an artist seriously?
As soon as I arrived in France at the age of 4, I started painting. Painting has always been in me, as I mentioned before. Between 2011 and 2021, I stopped painting and drawing to focus on my classical academic studies, Business School and the start of my professional career in the creative industries. Then Covid came. As with many lives, this period of restriction had an impact on mine. This enforced quarantine allowed me to refocus on myself and naturally, away from all external stimuli, I began to paint again, taking up oil painting in 2021 as a simple hobby. It was towards the end of 2022 that I took the big step of starting my artistic career full time, following a very pragmatic decision to meet an exhibition deadline. I thought at the time that painting would be a way of escaping in my spare time as it had been in my childhood. I never thought that being an artist would become my full-time job. Life decided otherwise! I don’t really have time to realise this new life as an artist, because I don’t have time to think. I’m always busy painting, studying, writing and reading. And I do it with the same commitment I had as a child in all the things I undertook. I guess I’ll be aware of everything that happens to me afterwards.
Alright, let’s talk about your work now… There’s various surreal scenes in your work, how do you come up with them, what’s the story behind them?
My scenes can come from a memory, a feeling, a personal reflection or a specific theme that I want to bring to life and reinterpret it in a playful, poetic and colorful way. My artistic research is based on both form (pictorial composition and aesthetic research) and content (narrative). I want both to coexist in a harmonious whole. Sometimes the form comes first, sometimes it’s the content. I let myself go with the flow, drawing on my personal history.
And the various protagonists…. Who are they?
There are several protagonists with physiological features that are unique to me (lips/hair/skin), but if you look closely, they’re not quite identical. I would say they are « kind of » self-portraits. I see my characters as an entity through which I can speak to the spectators.
When I paint my characters I don’t say to myself “Oh, that’s me on it!”. In some paintings for example, I use my figures to represent my biological mother and my adoptive mother. It puts them on an equal footing to have the same physical characteristics. Except that in life, one is white and the other Asian. There are certain paintings, I do know I paint myself, the ones with a very specific narrative. I sometimes get moved once I finish a very personal painting because it is as if, through a phenomenon of dissociation, I become a spectator of the story that I have just painted. Simply, I know in my flesh the story that is told on the canvas. And it can sometimes bring me tears to live my story again and see it painted. Painting is a never ending process of self-discovery.
Recently, when I came across some old childhood drawings, I realised that I’d been drawing the same face, with the same physical features, since forever. Maybe it’s also a way of trying to capture myself without ever succeeding, to paint what escapes my identity by painting alter egos that are both identical and different. The dialectic of ipse and idem through portraiture.
You mention painting horizons for those who have suffered. How do these horizons symbolize hope or ambiguity in your work?
I’m working on the poetic dimension of space, on what belongs to closed/intimate space and open/external space, and how this is in constant dialogue.
The horizon invites us to project ourselves elsewhere. It may soothes, invites meditation or travel. It seems to me that the most universal spectacle we marvel at at all times is that of sunset/sunrise. How many sunset photos do we all have on our phones? It’s a spectacle that repeats itself every day, and still we try to immortalise it every time.
What does this horizon and this world that is setting/rising tell us, if not our finitude, the hope that the sun will appear again, or the reflection of the state of transition we live in ourselves? I paint horizons at dawn or dusk to bear witness to all this.
You embed autobiographical elements and existential themes into your paintings. Can you tell me about the topic narrativity? And why it’s important to you?
My painting is a narrative painting. I see each of my canvases as a page of a book that could be opened at random in a library. This book could be an autobiography, a collection of poems or a philosophical essay. Only in my painting there’s a beginning and an end to the story. Narrativity is a primordial element in my work, in the sense that my work is about telling my story, bearing witness to my history and my individuality. But narrative presupposes otherness, a viewer or a reader. This dialogue with the viewer is what I want to explore through layers of plural narrative. That’s why it’s important for me to accompany the works with a poem and to add literary passages that resonate with the overall narrative of the painting. The written narrative and the visual narrative respond to each other.
Can you walk me through your creative process from beginning to end result?
My paintings are all pre-programmed. There’s very little room for improvisation, as my sketches are already very elaborate, with definitive colours and compositions. So for me, painting is more a process of making things real than pure creativity. In the future I’d like to leave more room for free gesture and spontaneity…on very big big size canvas. We’ll see where that takes me!
Can you also tell me about your use of symbolism?
Every element that surrounds us is imbued with an experience, containing memories and sensations, positive or otherwise. I only have to look at a Bonne Maman strawberry jam to be reminded of the butter and jam toasts my mother used to eat for breakfast. At the time, I found it fascinating to mix butter and jam. The poetic, temporal and symbolic dimension of a banal everyday object is very interesting to explore. The objects around us are the guardians of time and memory. That’s the point of Proust’s famous madeleine. I like to play with the viewer by scattering objects and references that are part of the semantics of my life. If the viewers know my story or the meaning of this or that element beforehand, then they have the key to reading my painting. Or not! They’re completely free to see how my elements resonate with their own story.
How do you approach color?
Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve loved using and combining bright colors. I have a special relationship with them, whether they’re playful (for example, pink is a very playful color for me), symbolic (for example, for me deep blue is a melancholy color, and light blue and yellow are colors that symbolise hope) or simply pragmatic (violet to express the shadows of pink, for example). I’d say I have a naive and interpretive approach to color. If grass is green in nature, I’m going to make grass green in my paintings, the way we imagine green, not the way green actually is in nature. I want to paint the world as it appears to me, not as it is in its physical reality.
So with what we just talked about, what are you hoping to convey?
I want to convey both a very physical aesthetic pleasure and more metaphysical reflections on human existence, with my own particular kind of poetry. I want to create parallel worlds where women, freed from the injunctions on their bodies, can live naked, gamble, drink Romanée-Conti, express their feelings, play checkers games, catch stars, read, take their breakfast in bed… and this, freely without ever looking down. Through reverse voyeurism, my characters challenge the viewer to anchor their presence, their strength, their vulnerability.
I think there’s also a deep desire to bear witness to my life, to share my vision of the world, to leave a trace of my existence, to anchor it more firmly, as one would write one’s autobiographical memoirs.
In a parallel universe who would you be? and what would you be doing?
One of my biggest regrets is that I cannot sing. Music has a very important place in my life, as does cooking. I think in a parallel universe I’d be a singer, a gourmet chef, a painter and a professional surfer all rolled into one. So I’d like a parallel universe where I could live forever (so could my loves ones)!
What qualities do you find most important in the people you choose to spend time with?
What I value most in my relationships is honesty, depth of soul, empathy. We wear enough masks in society that we don’t have to do it with our friends. I am lucky to have deep friendships in which I feel 100% myself and I am so grateful for that. Having experienced friendship breakups in the past, I am not afraid to end relationships with people who no longer have the qualities I value. Over time, we know ourselves better and we become more demanding of the people with whom we build relationships. Time is too precious to spend it with people who are not 100% connected to you!
Anybody you look up to?
I have a deep admiration for all these women artists, writers and activists, past or present. I spontaneously think of Narges Mohammadi, Maya Angelou, Forugh Farrokhzâd, bell hooks, Simin Behbahani, Nelly Arcan or Virginia Woolf. I can’t name all of them! They each built steps towards women’s freedom.
What motivates you?
This is a difficult question. I guess what I want is to live a full and true life. Art allows me to do that. Well, if I can do something other than art, I’m very happy, like surfing, watching a beautiful sunset, having dinner with the people I love, laughing with my mom, discovering the new song I’m going to listen on repeat for the next few days. Poetry in the little things. These are also great motivations to love life. Being aware of my privileges and my freedom here in France gives me the responsibility to have a life worthy of it.
How would you describe a perfect day?
A blue sky is all it takes to make a day perfect, won’t you think?
Alright Sophie, I always ask these two questions at the end of an interview. The first is. What’s your favorite movie(s) and why?
I don’t have any favorite films, but I have films and documentaries that have left their mark on me because of their harshness or their poetry:
– Grave of The Fireflies – Isao Takahata
– Shame – Steve McQueen
– Nomadland – Chloé Zhao
– Shoplifters – Hirokasu Kore-eda
– Mustang – Deniz Gamze Ergüven
– Citizenfour / All the Beauty and the Bloodshed – Laura Poitras
– Love – Gaspard Noé
– Perfect Days – Win Wenders
– Spirited Away / Princess Mononoke – Miyazaki
– Eternal Sunshine Of the Spotless Mind – Michel Gondry
– Point break – Kathryn Bigelow
The second is. What song(s) are you currently listening to the most right now?
I am a music addict. I listen to about ten hours a day. Right now I am listening to these songs a lot:
– One day – Cleo Sol
– Sweet Tides / (The Forgotten People) – Thievery Corporation
– I’m on Fire – Chromatics
– Blow my High – Kendrick Lamar
– Sucia – Kehlani / Jill Scott / Young Miko
– Diamonds on the Soles of her shoes – Paul Simon
– Les Véliplanchistes – Flavien Berger
– Tommy – Tommy Genesis
– Sous tes lèvres – Lala&ce
– The Other Lover – Little Dragon
– Poetry: How does it feel? – Aqua Naru