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Sophie Alouf-Bertot, born in 1945, is a Belgian graphic designer, artist, and former teacher living and working in Brussels.

Studies
Sophie Alouf first studied at the Institut Sainte Marie in Brussels before joining the graphic arts department of the National Superior School for Architecture and Visual Arts La Cambre (ENSAAV), where she graduated in 1968. Among her classmates were Monique Dubois, Antoinette Sturbelle, Jean-Christophe Geluck and Sami Alouf.

S+S Alouf
Sophie Alouf founded « S+S Alouf » studio in 1970 with her husband Sami Alouf, who graduated from La Cambre in 1967. They met during their studies in Luc Van Malderen’s class. They lived in Lebanon for a short time and eventually preferred to move back to Belgium, where they have since been running the studio and working together as associate freelancers. In their collaboration, Sophie masters the colors, contrasts, and the illustrative and pictorial work, whereas Sami focuses on wayfinding, logotypes, and lettering. They undertake most of their poster design commissions in this way. If they separate their roles for some specific parts of the process, the final decisions for the finished version of the design are made in common. Sophie and Sami Alouf have occasionally collaborated with other illustrators and photographers on some specific projects, but their duo is the essential structure of the studio.

For a while, they settled a graphic studio in Algiers, where Sami used to work during the week. It was important that one of them stayed geographically closer to clients in the Middle East (mostly hotels), in order to maintain better communication with them. Meanwhile, Sophie was still doing her part of the work in Belgium and teaching at the same time. It was only at that point of their career they appointed some free-lance designers to work with them.

Studio work
Sophie has always preferred to have her studio at home, so she can more easily manage her time between her family and her professional job. She sometimes works for only a short time — or on the contrary, for ten hours — looking back at a project late at night, having breaks during the day, or having a sudden idea at midnight. Thus, she allows space for hesitation in her working process.

Clients and commissions

Sophie and Sami Alouf have undertaken wayfinding projects (exterior and interior), posters, brochures, folders, interior design, signage programmes, logotypes, visual identities... for a wide range of different companies and organizations, in Belgium and more often abroad such as:

The Woluwe Shopping Center, Brussels

The Westland Shopping Center, Brussels

The Commission of the European communities: General directorate of Communication and

Audi-Visual

The MEDIA programme of the European Community

The Palais des Beaux Arts of Brussels: Hall du Palais des Beaux-Arts

The Brussels Design Center,

Sheraton Management Corporation (before being Starwood)

and several hotels all around the world, especially in the middle East, for the major International

Hotel Companies for whom they conceived several corporate visual identities.

The Woluwe and Westland Shopping Centers, which were at the time organizing exhibitions,

are one of their clients for whom they mainly conceived posters (over 200).

As for editorial work, Sophie made illustrations of games for the famous French children’s

magazine « J’aime Lire » - Bayard Presse.

Collage as a preparatory step
Sophie has always used collage as an important step of her research, whether for posters or other types of images. To expand the possibilities of color combinations, she uses painted paper that she cuts to represent each of the shapes in the final work. Her collage process isn’t only about gluing pieces of paper together but, rather, cutting independent shapes and arranging the different layers on transparent cellophane to create a multitude of various textures and backgrounds, allowing unexpected assemblages of surfaces before gluing, scanning, and transposing the small research format to an A2-size poster. Whether the compositions are organic or very geometrical, papercutting is an essential part of Sophie’s work.

Silkscreen printing
Sophie and Sami Alouf printed many of their posters with silkscreen knowing that this technique allows to print small copies for more affordable price and also it allows a deeper color renderings. They mostly worked with the silkscreen printer Philippe Strulen (SP Screen) or Jacques Lemaire. S+S Alouf used also to create greeting card posters each year and send them to their clients; however, these have been replaced now-on by a more commonly sized, digitally printed greeting cards. Sophie was especially enthusiastic about silkscreen printing because she could more carefully control the rendering of the printing inks.

Teaching Career
Before becoming a teacher, Sophie participated in several examinations of students’ works as an external jury member. After taking part in a few of them, she started her teaching career in the graphic design department of the St Luc Institute in Brussels in 1979, where her colleagues included Hermann Lampaert, Paul Horvath, and Jacqueline Ost. She was the head of the department there from 1992 until 2010. From 1988 to 2004, she taught a course on color and image (couleur et image) in La Cambre, a visual arts and architecture school where she had previously studied and where her mother had also taught. One of her colleagues at La Cambre was the graphic designer Michel Olyff.

Teaching has brought fulfillment to Sophie and has been a very important part of her career. Interacting with students and their work has been both motivating and challenging. She encouraged her students to work with collages, and she regretted the absence of paper and

pencils, which were slowly replaced by computers in the school studios.

Painting
Today, Sophie dedicates her time to painting — a passion that she kept silent for a long time. Sophie paints with acrylic on canvas, but the process of making is, as always, involves a papercut model that is then enlarged to create the structural pattern of the painting.

Philippe André Rihoux, art history professor, wrote in Sophie Alouf’s short biography,

« Her compositions stabilize the colors and increase the frontal, the classicism, the pure line. »

Sophie proceeds with collage for her painting work, just as she uses collage to conceive poster designs. Sophie Alouf’s paintings are characterized by the same geometrical shapes that comprise her graphic design work. Not only is the process of making similar, but the visuals are also framed within a pattern according to what a  graphic designer usually seeks — communication through recognizable, understandable, and readable shapes. Sophie Alouf’s painting shows precisely how her artistic work is rooted in a designer’s way of thinking and making, although the paintings stand on their own as original, (non-commissioned) pieces of art. Rectangles, circles, squares, and triangles meet, blend, and overlay to create complete images. The titles of the paintings — Chef Indien, Abstraction, Losange, Groupe, Rita & Peter, Echec & Mat, Clown, Silence, Twins, Où suis-je, Green, Beauty, Puzzle, Cubisme, Jail, Patchwork, Yellow Moon, Déformation, Alain, Ovale bleu, Clown bleu, 3 Personnages, L’Aiglon, Couple, Personnage, 8, and Triangle, among others — sometimes bring a narrative dimension to her work, suggesting a specific idea that opens the range of interpretive possibilities while almost adding a new layer of meaning or a new background to the picture.

Exuding a playful energy, the shapes comprise a sort of vocabulary from which to choose and compose. A few different patterns can be recognized from one painting to another: black and white stripes, along with one or two black dots always recalling the idea of a face. The shapes appearing in Sophie Alouf’s paintings are reminiscent of a typographic work and exhibit the geometrical language as a defining feature.

Objects
Sophie has also extended her practice to other fields and media. Going from graphic design topainting, she also made a step back towards design by designing three-dimensional objects, like wooden sculptures, for example, built in several copies, painted in different colors after her initial model. She and Sami Alouf also designed a carpet, featuring a recognizable papercut design.

Again, in the same spirit, the use of geometrical papercut shapes is recurrent in those pieces. Using collage in the research steps of her works — from her posters and other graphic design commissions to her personal painting practice — Sophie had always kept this technique hidden in personal folders, until she started making bigger collages, as finished pieces, with gouache-painted paper in order to make them last longer. She also makes relief collages, adding thickness in between the layers of paper, or even using balsa wood, instead, for more rigidity.

Exhibitions and Publications
In October 2011, Sophie Alouf exhibited her paintings at the Grand Marché d’Arts Contemporains (GMAC) of Paris Bastille.

Chambre Belge des graphistes
Sophie and Sami have been members of the Chambre Belge des Graphistes, chaired at that time by André Piroux. They published a portfolio showing the work of its graphic designers.

Influences
Sophie Alouf’s work is inspired by the geometrical shapes and functional aesthetics of the Bauhaus, as well as graphic designer André François, Henri Matisse, Sonia Delaunay, Sophie Taeuber, and Frank Stella, among others.