THERAPY AS ART – Claudia Bonollo aka Sophia Cromatica
THERAPY AS ART
Claudia Bonollo aka Sophia Cromatica
Her most significant body of work, The Imagined Body (formerly titled Beauty Is Itself a Cure, 2002–2026), selected in Paris by Les Rencontres Image et Science and CAMERA (Conseil Audiovisuel Mondial pour les Études et les Réalisations sur l’Art), is conceived as a multimedia and interdisciplinary research.
Within this work, the dialogue with the cell becomes a poetic narrative, articulated through visual patterns that vary according to the organ—or the emotion—it seeks to activate.
Her practice proposes a conception of art as a form of therapy, integrating different hypotheses—including metaphysical perspectives—on the body and the emotions. Rooted in empathy, it investigates synaesthesia and the relationships between colour, emotion and health.
Within this framework, she created La Ruta de la Vida for the Colegio Oficial de Médicos de Madrid—today a permanent installation—a project conceived to heal the memory of a place through the convergence of biology, colour and music, using specific frequencies derived from music therapy.
The video is part of a parallel line of research in which colour generates space. While each video and projection exists as an autonomous work, they also become the origin of Sensitive Spaces: environments in which colour ceases to be image and becomes the very condition of space, perception and experience.
These environments bring together physical and virtual dimensions, transforming chromatic narratives into inhabitable experiences. Conceived at an architectural scale, they dissolve the conventional distance between the viewer and the artwork, allowing the body to enter the image rather than simply contemplate it. Colour is no longer observed from the outside; it becomes an environment to inhabit.
The cell is the absolute protagonist of my research, The Imagined Body. I have imagined it, studied it and analysed it. I have transformed it through new life-giving movements, seduced it with light and colour, healed it through my own therapies, contemplated its beauty through movement and narrative, and generated spaces: ephemeral architectures and immersive installations.
Like a contemporary Orpheus, I have entered into dialogue with cells. I have sought to comfort them with colour and movement, to reorient them according to a visionary geography. Biology soon became Metabiology. The journey through the body gradually unfolded into a series of narrative cycles: a visual and sonic diary whose cyclical nature reflects an unending process of emotional metamorphosis.
In my Chromatic Narratives, colour itself becomes narrative: a language composed of light and colour, engaged in a continuous dialogue with our inner landscape. Narration is itself a form of therapy because every act of telling implies a movement of consciousness, and every movement of consciousness transforms perception. Whenever we begin to tell a story, we also begin to perceive ourselves differently.
The visual material gradually becomes a fragmentary narrative that, like every myth, remains open to countless versions and interpretations.
When it all began, I could never have imagined how far this research would evolve. It gradually extended from the cell to the entire human body, to the study of emotions, happiness and the holographic paradigm—a controversial hypothesis emerging from certain scientific theories. Nor could I have imagined that these transfigured cells would eventually generate a multidisciplinary body of work with multiple applications, giving rise to what I now define as Therapy as Art.
