The Unsaid Remains Remembered: Dubai

1 October - 2 November 2025

JD Malat Gallery Dubai presents The Unsaid Remains Remembered, a solo exhibition by Paris-based emerging artist Sophie-Yen Bretez. In this new body of work, Bretez captures moments when one space becomes another, when times overlap, and when memory persists as life shifts forward – what she calls a “dramaturgy of passage,” unfolding across bold, large-scale, compositions and shaped canvases that extend her exploration beyond the traditional frame.
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Sophie-Yen Bretez, « I was starving before birth, Then the wind came , I ate, and my name was lost. », 2025
Sophie-Yen Bretez

« It was already noon

at the banquet of absence

I set the table, stitched the menu

everything was missing

everything but life. »,

2025

Exploration of spaces within the canvas

Bretez is a natural storyteller. Before painting each work, Bretez composes a poem exploring memory, personal experience, or literary inspiration (such as the writings of French author Marguerite Duras). The titles of her works come from these poems, creating another layer of meaning to be deciphered by the viewer. Written text also features within her canvases, where newspapers and novels are common enigmatic motifs. Working with shaped canvases and large-scale compositions, Bretez transforms everyday objects — a window, a table, a bed, a clock — into symbolic entry points that guide the viewer from one state of being into another. These familiar motifs, paired with horizons of shifting skies, mountains, and seasons, create a tension between the intimacy of everyday spaces and the vastness of the natural world. Her paintings are not just depictions of objects or places, but explorations of how these spaces hold layers of memory and experience, turning the ordinary into emotional landmarks.
Sophie-Yen Bretez,
« For a long time I ignored
what the water knew
the answer was beneath the surface
I dove
I almost knew. »,
2025

The Observing and the Observed

This exhibition marks a bold evolution in Bretez’s practice. Known for her inverted voyeurism: striking figures that return the gaze, Bretez continues to unsettle the relation between the observer and the observed. In this new body of work, she broadens her visual language to find vulnerability and power beyond frontal nudity: reflections, landscapes, objects, and split horizons become carriers of charge. A knife, a clock, or a cup can be as intense as the figure itself; reflections in glass and bite marks on fruit hint at what is absent. Her paintings are charged with atmosphere and tension. As the artist explains: “Within a single image, one can be at once in day and night, in life and death, in memory and forgetting.” The result is a widened field for the same questions: presence and absence, strength and fragility, sameness and difference, played out not only in the body but across the world that surrounds it.

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The Unsaid Remains Remembered: Dubai

Exploration of spaces within the canvas

The Observing and the Observed

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