Leipzig, Germany – My first impression of Marina Perez Simão’s recent oil paintings – of which 17 are shown in G2 in Leipzig, in the first institutional solo exhibition of the artist in Germany – was how remarkably grounded they felt. Despite all their clear molten, with their wavy forms that indicate wavy landscapes, these compositions also conveyed a strong, even lusty feeling of mass. In her works, all painted in 2024, the artist systematizes the motifs of nature and distils them into interlocking volumes and color tires, making them just as cerebral as they are sensuel.
Perez Simōez has mention in interviews that she is inspired by the baroque Movements in her native Brazil and Europe. This offers some hints about the volumetric matters that she uses dramatic effects. Sunrise and sunset are, for example, the most important events of the first two title paintings. In the first, a golden glow is flat like a pancake on tires of thick lavender, blue and gray, which can display bottom or water. Here light is an independent solid instead of an effect; Its brightness hardly changes the adjacent colors or shapes. The sun is more literal in the second painting, and yet the landscape even opens here as a petal, which suggests that this spectacle is a quasi-mystical portal for rehearsal instead of a clear image of nature.
However, the paintings of Perez Simão are hardly graceful. When I looked at them, I thought less about the lush gold that adorned the baroque churches of Brazil than the faded fabrics that sometimes dress the humble holy images of those churches. I thought of fiber confused, gold contaminated with patina and lush hills that are subjected by the inexpensive dirt of a dry season. All these elements, some geographical or art -historical, others emotionally, inform the works of Perez Simão, who do not so much offer a criticism of modernism as a gloomy re -evaluation of its bend to the meditative and mystical.
The liquid transitions of the paintings between figuration and abstraction are also reminiscent of the Brazilian modernist painter Tarsila do Amaral. Although that artist usually recorded landscapes, such as palm trees and farm animals, with more direct specificity, more mysterious works, such as “The moon“And”Distance(Both 1928) Share an affinity with that of Perez Simão. Both artists seem to look for a language that speaks so much against the sublimity of nature as with a person’s state of mind when it is confronted with his greatness.
Just like Amaral on her most symbolic, Perez Simaõ conveys existential miracle and loneliness. In fact, she can go the latter quality one step further – in contrast to Do Amaral, who inserted a human figure or worked with scales that suggested a correspondence of a gazer for natural formations in her works, Perez Simão Al loses Such limits on proportion, viewers completely immersed in nature and the theater of the mind. This complete immersion showed me the feeling that she was closest to the modernist painter Georgia O’Keffe. Art historian Barbara Novak once wrote that when ‘you are staring at the hollowed -out centers of [her] Open petals … you have the feeling that you could fall in. “The works of Perez Simão invite one in the same way to take a dip.
Marina Perez Simão: Zwielicht will take place in G2 Kunsthalle (Dittrichring 13, Leipzig, Germany) up to and including 2. The exhibition was organized by the institution.
