“When you look at a painting you’re exercising freedom […] I’m only here to provide a fertile terrain for it to happen.”
—Marina Perez Simão
Organic and elemental, Marina Perez Simão's Untitled accentuates and transforms the landscape through sweeping, rhythmic gestures, liberating form and painting with light. Consciously dissolving the foreground and background, playing with perspective and the tensions between substance and immateriality, the São Paulo-based painter transforms memories of her homeland into sensual, meandering plains that evade the laws of the natural world, conjuring celestial bodies beyond.
A wide ripple of bright acidic green weaves across the central circular form, while thin applications of purple, sandy yellow, and cobalt blue echo these rythmic patterns. In ebbs and flows,the composition reveals impressions of the salty sea, a vast cavern or a tangled vine. Poised between abstraction and figuration, Simão enlivens this tension between solid and liquid, void and form. As she explains, ‘ambivalence, in my case, is something that I seek out […] I need a certain kind of mystery’.i
“Marina's work attempts to open up portals of wonder in the viewer, making them imagine other universes where the limits of reality don't hold."
—Diana Campbell
Born in Vitória in 1980, the vistas of Simão’s birthplace and other local regions including the urban sprawl of Rio de Janeiro and undulating terrain of Minas Gerais repeatedly re-surface across her work. Created out of the longing to escape the confines enforced by the pandemic, Simão here translates the emotional power of the landscape so fundamental to her identity through a careful handling of exuberant colour. Commencing with abbreviated pencil and watercolour studies, the artist stands to paint her large-scale compositions, true to her rigourous training at the the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The environment of Simão’s studio is fundamental to her practice; accompanied by music and only welcoming visitors in the afternoon, the artist creates an atmosphere of sanctity and solitude, allowing her to paint in ‘one continuous flow’ and establishing a lyricism that is palpable across the glowing surface.ii Music like memory, informs her painting, as Perez Simão’s studio is filled with the songs of musicians like Cesária Évora and Charles Mingus. It is in this environment that paint and colour is able to be ‘tuned’ by Perez Simão and realised at the right ‘pitch’.
-
Among a new generation of pioneering female abstract painters like Flora Yukhnovich and Jadé Fadojutimi, Marina Perez Simão’s lucid landscapes are informed by the fertile vistas of Brazil, reimagined through intuition and sensation.
-
Represented by Mendes Wood DM, Perez Simão’s beguiling panoramas are held in significant collections worldwide, including, among many others, the Blenheim Art Foundation, Oxford; the Long Museum, Shanghai and the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami.
-
The artist's recent projects include a residency with Cahiers d’Art, Paris in 2022 while her third solo show with Pace recently closed on 2nd March 2024 in Los Angeles.
