Descripción de la Exposición
With ZWIELICHT, the G2 Kunsthalle is showing the first institutional solo exhibition in Germany of Brazilian painter Marina Perez Simão (*1980). Simão’s work is characterised by intense colouring, which, through an expressive and soft style, forms moving areas of colour that interact to create fluid, dynamic landscapes. Simão’s work is characterised by two fundamental elements of the physical world: movement and light.
Simão’s pictures are abstract paintings that evoke a multitude of associations. The interplay of surface, line and colour appeals directly to the viewer’s perceptions and stimulates their senses. The works thus function as a form of communication beyond our familiar language. The individual pictorial elements form the vocabulary and the work as a whole the basic structure of a new language.
Due to their open design, Simão’s works also allow for figurative associations and play with art historical epochs. Simão’s colour surfaces bulge, fill and empty like breathing, organic systems. At the same time, the forms stretch across the canvas like landscapes. Mountain range-like features draw a horizon, sky compositions or moments reminiscent of paths, lakes or fields. Sceneries are created that are reminiscent of classical landscape depictions from art history. Simão constantly creates new spaces in the pictures. Wave-like forms, which seem to be on the verge of collapse, sometimes form cave-like or rock-like spatial constructions. The landscapes can be understood as metaphors for inner landscapes, composed of feelings and emotions and filled with their own biographical content. Simão adds a universal space and time component to her depictions. The elements vibrate and flow in and out of each other. Simão’s targeted and intensive ductus accelerates the content of her colour surfaces: Like the outlines of a moving object, the silhouettes blur into fuzzy streaks. Different shades of colour mix to form voluminous bodies of colour. These colour spectra form the second fundamental component in Simão’s work: light. It seems as if an inherent light source makes the paintings glow. They thus also open up associations with Christian icon paintings, which used gold leaf to imitate a divine light that contrasts with the light that surrounds us, or with stained glass windows in sacred church buildings. Simão shows ambivalent lighting moods: The atmosphere within the paintings and among the landscapes created by the paintings in the exhibition here meanders between radiant luminosity and twilight. In the darker passages of her works, the lack of light seems to swallow up contours, creating a diffuse mass that mixes and absorbs content. Similar to the principle of twilight, the clear contours in Simão’s work are lost in an indefinable matter and serve as a projection surface for her own imagination.
Different moods can be perceived within a single work. Simão contrasts light with dark, warm with cold and hard with soft elements. These contrasts can be related to fundamental dualisms of nature: Life and death, consciousness and subconsciousness, light and darkness, dynamics and statics.
Marina Simão’s paintings are a symbiosis of archaic materiality, art historical references and contemporary experiences and function as an allegorical projection surface for emotions, feelings and narratives. In conjunction with the systematic use of recurring elements, Simão’s work generates a poetic force that can be read universally.
Exposición. 19 nov de 2024 - 02 mar de 2025 / Museo Nacional del Prado / Madrid, España
Formación. 23 nov de 2024 - 29 nov de 2024 / Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS) / Madrid, España
