Sofia Bonati (Buenos Aires) is an illustrator and painter. He has collaborated with many famous magazines, including Vanity Fair, and even in the world of publishing it is possible to find his creations (Mondadori has used his portraits for special editions dedicated to the anniversary of Jane Austen). His illustrations are so appealing for the use of soft and soft colors and the presence of only ink for the nuances and volumes. And obviously for the subjects: pretty women posing, almost always half-length, portrayed with a fixed and inexpressive gaze.

What makes these little dolls beautiful are the details made of unexpected and incoherent grafts, like the wings of butterfly in place of the hair or the backdrops of the illustration that at the same time become the dress of the subject, creating a contrast such as to make the face of the giant and enchanting eyes bounce in the foreground.
  

There is something extremely adorable about these women. Their seriousness, sometimes crossed by what would seem to be closer to melancholy, sometimes apathetic in the grayest of ways, seems to take -paradossalmente-, playing with us. I tried to better understand what the charm of these girls beyond their unreal details and their defined and big eyes, the only part of their body to have a definitive chiaroscuro and therefore a volume. And in the end I focused on their attitude, their pose, their expressions.   And I saw all the young girls of today. Small and delightful beauty queens, often obsessed with pleasing others, with their standardized selfies in a single expressive mode: smile a little, wink a lot. And suddenly all the social reality in which we see humanity navigate at different levels of narcissism has become all a fun candor.



There is this concept, dictated perhaps by too many years of advertising with models that do not reflect the real woman, according to which the less you are expressive, the more beautiful you are. What is not true and that, moreover, has embarrassingly endorsed us in all the nuances in which sensuality could be ignored.
And these new generations of Millennials in which we all find ourselves confronting each other are victims and executioners of this mechanism more mental than physical, and in any case terribly effective.

This is why the illustrations of Sofia Bonati have the charm of irony and, why not, of irreverence. The faces of these women are unquestionably beautiful, of perfect, objective beauty. So much so that, in fact, they all look like dolls with pink cheeks. But these unreal grafts of colors, animals and clouds that intertwine in their heads and in their bodies break the harmony of just beautiful-and-just, destroying simple admiration and guiding us instead towards interpretation and meaning, if you want .

Many of these additional details appear to be charged with symbols. But this is up to each of us to decipher them. The working thing in these works of ink and watercolor by Sofia Bonati is this contrast between what you see and what you perceive.  They are all beautiful women, perhaps distant, perhaps overweight, as fascinating as only the beautiful and unattainable can be. But at the same time they seem to suggest that we do not take them too seriously, neither they, nor ourselves. And that's what makes them extremely delicious, to eat with the eyes and the heart, in a mix of sensuality, elegance and joy that makes them more Women than ever.

Sofia Bonati  is an Argentinian artist who with her illustrations manages to capture the facets of the various types of female personalities. The beauty of his drawings is completed with a distinctive feature, that is the constant use of abstract backgrounds such as thunderclouds, vertiginous labyrinths and floral motifs.

Each woman is depicted alone, to underline its uniqueness; what is striking in particular is the great ability of the artist to be able to faithfully represent the facial expressions of his protagonists and their nuances.   Graphite and chalk, paint and felt-tip pens are indispensable tools for achieving the desired result. br>


The strong and distinctive expressions on the face of each woman suggest that the characters have control of their environment, rather than being included by them. In a recent collaboration with Society6, many of the artist's works were animated by the glitch artist Chris McDaniel, which enhances the visual impact of these wonderful creations.

Find other works on his profile  Behance.