LEIPZIG, Germany — My first impression of Marina Perez Simão’s current oil work — 17 of that are proven at G2 in Leipzig, within the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany — was how remarkably grounded they felt. For all their evident moltenness, with their billowy shapes suggesting undulating landscapes, these compositions additionally conveyed a robust, even voluptuous sense of mass. In her works, all painted in 2024, the artist systematizes nature’s motifs and distills them into interlocking volumes and shade bands, making them as cerebral as they’re sensuous.
Perez Simōez has talked about in interviews that she is impressed by the Baroque actions in her native Brazil and Europe. This affords some trace as to the volumetric heft she deploys to dramatic results. Dawn and sundown, as an example, are the primary occasions of the primary two untitled work. Within the former, a golden glow lays flat like a pancake on bands of thick lavender, blue, and grey, which may depict both soil or water. Right here, mild is a self-contained strong moderately than an impact; its luminosity hardly alters the adjoining colours or types. The solar is extra literal within the second portray, and but even right here the panorama opens like a petal, suggesting that this spectacle is a quasi-mystical portal to reverie moderately than a matter-of-fact depiction of nature.
Perez Simão’s work, nonetheless, are hardly ornate. When taking a look at them, I believed much less of the lavish gold adorning Brazil’s Baroque church buildings than the pale materials that typically costume these church buildings’ humbler saintly statues. I considered fiber muddled by age, gold tainted with patina, and luxurious hills subdued by a dry season’s unyielding grime. All these parts, some geographical or artwork historic, others emotive, inform Perez Simão’s works, which provide not a lot a critique of Modernism as a lot as a somber reevaluation carried forth by her bend in the direction of the meditative and mystical.
Marina Perez Simão, “Untitled” (2024), oil on canvas
The work’ fluid transitions between figuration and abstraction additionally call to mind Brazilian Modernist painter Tarsila do Amaral. Although that artist usually captured landscapes, corresponding to palm timber and cattle, with extra direct specificity, extra mysterious works, corresponding to “The Moon” and “Distance” (each 1928) share an affinity with these of Perez Simão. Each artists appear to hunt a language that speaks as a lot to nature’s sublimity because it does to 1’s way of thinking when confronted with its grandeur.
Like do Amaral at her most symbolic, Perez Simaõ conveys existential marvel and loneliness. In truth, she might take that latter high quality a step additional — not like do Amaral, who inserted a human determine or labored with scales that recommended a correspondence of a gazer’s physique to pure formations in her works, Perez Simão dissolves all such boundaries and sense of proportion, leaving viewers totally immersed in nature and the thoughts’s theater. This entire immersion left me feeling that she could be most intently aligned with modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe. Artwork historian Barbara Novak as soon as wrote that when “you gaze at the hollowed centers of [her] opened petals … you feel as if you could fall inside.” Perez Simão’s works equally invite one to take a plunge.
Marina Perez Simão, “Untitled” (2024), oil on canvas
Each works Marina Perez Simão, “Untitled” (2024), oil on canvas
Set up view of Marina Perez Simão, Zwielicht
Marina Perez Simão: Zwielicht continues at G2 Kunsthalle (Dittrichring 13, Leipzig, Germany) via March 2. The exhibition was organized by the establishment.