Sophie Varin
How can you be so sure
Location: cassette, Fukuoka, Japan
Date: 2025.11.28 – 12.28
About
Exhibition direction and production for Brussels-based French artist Sophie Varin’s solo exhibition at cassette. Featuring more than 20 new works, this show marked the artist’s first exhibition in Japan.
Actualization
- Curatorial Direction
- Artist Liaison
- Logistics
- Writing
Exhibition Overview
Known for her miniature canvases as well as her three-dimensional pieces, Sophie Varin’s works often depict ordinary scenarios from daily life with a touch of strange dreaminess and ambiguity. Her soft, blurry paintings oscillate between reality and fiction, their small scale placing the viewer into the position of an omniscient overseer. The gaze of the observer is a central theme within Varin’s practice; within her works, she often explores our voyeuristic desire to perceive, as well as the role of the gaze in generating desire itself.
How do these desires, our dreams and fantasies, influence our perception, shape our actions, and ultimately give rise to reality? This question forms the core of this exhibition, which draws inspiration from medieval dream poetry and Roger Caillois’s book The uncertainty that comes from dreams (1956). The show explores the motif of “the dream” from various angles: as fiction and hallucination, as a portal to the truth, as a reality in itself.
Populated by characters that seem half-conscious, drunk, or sleepy, Varin’s long horizontal landscapes cycle through dawn to dusk underneath a disorienting array of multiple suns and moons. Other works feature scenes of dinner parties tinged with a lingering atmosphere of conviviality and performance; of stories shared, exaggerated, distorted.
Vivid, hazy, and fragmented, like scenes from a half-forgotten fable, Varin’s works communicate a dissatisfied quest for certainty and truth within a reality that can be just as convoluted as a dream.
Written by Erika Dreskler
Info
Sophie Varin
How can you be so sure
2025/11/28 – 12/28
Opening reception: 2025/11/28
cassette
1-2-8 Tojinmachi, Chuo-ku, Fukuoka 810-0063
Exhibition Information
http://www.sophievarin.com
https://www.instagram.com/fat_varin
https://cassette-f.jp
https://www.instagram.com/cassette_fukuoka