Sofia Basto Riousse paints, embroiders, and illustrates, sometimes all at once. Swapping her law practice for a practice in the arts, her work comes to life from the Dubai nook that she has baptized Manigua Studio. Manigua, alluding to her native Colombia’s muddy and entangled landscapes, is the living-and-breathing project through which Sofia blends with greenery and people-watches between the Magdalena River, France, Singapore, and the Gulf. Once a muralist and calligraphy aficionada, today Sofia (and Manigua) creates with nature as her most reliable resource, be it for pigments, compositions, or to accommodate a nostalgia nestled between the Andes mountains and the Amazon. 

Sofia Basto Riousse has exhibited in Dubai, Pitalito, Ras Al Khaimah, Madrid, Luxembourg and online. Her daily coffee is black, and her gardens always colorful.

My work is an exploration of the sacred within the ordinary—an ode to the everyday beauty that often goes unnoticed. Through painting, embroidery, and mixed media, I weave together botanical elements, feminine energy, and ancestral memory to create a visual language that speaks of belonging, nostalgia, and the deep connection between humans and nature.

Rooted in the tropics yet shaped by an ever-shifting sense of place, my practice is a meditation on how geography imprints itself on identity. The landscapes I’ve crossed—dense jungles, manicured European gardens, and the vast silence of the desert—have all left their mark, not just as backdrops but as active forces shaping perception. In contrast to the humid abundance of my origins, where green erupts in relentless waves, I’ve learned to see the poetry in restraint:

The pared-down palette of winter branches, the way desert light turns sand into gold at dusk. These encounters live in my work as quiet negotiations between memory and adaptation, between the flora I was born to and the ecosystems I’ve passed through.

The natural world, to me, is inherently feminine—Pacha Mama, the Quechua embodiment of Mother Earth, is a guiding force in my visual cosmology. The act of nurturing plants, traditionally entrusted to women in my family, mirrors the creative process itself: a slow, deliberate cultivation of life and meaning. My paintings merge the human and the botanical, questioning the assumed hierarchy between species. A vine might twist into a vein; a fruit could split open to reveal a childhood scene. These juxtapositions are my way of dissolving borders—between the cultivated and the wild, the native and the foreign, the self and the landscape.

Technically, my process is intuitive and experimental. I work primarily with acrylics, watercolors,and textiles, allowing the materials to guide me as much as the concepts. The interplay of embroidery and paint adds a tactile dimension, a reminder of the handmade and the ephemeral.

Light, color, and organic forms dominate my compositions, often bending toward the surreal—a way to disrupt the familiar and reveal its hidden magic. A still life of market fruits might float against a dreamlike jungle, or a domestic interior might dissolve into foliage, reflecting the way places layer themselves in the mind long after we’ve left them.

Ultimately, my art is an act of reverence—for the land, for the past, and for the quiet rituals that sustain us. It is a call to look closer, to find the extraordinary in the mundane, and to remember that we are not separate from nature but woven into its endless, evolving tapestry.

Artist statement