Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, I have a painter to present to you who will shake you out of your aesthetic torpor. Marina Perez Simão is not simply a Brazilian artist, she is a cosmic navigator who guides us through the uncertain borders of perception. In her canvases, this extraordinary woman captures the very essence of that moment when day embraces night, when dream merges with reality.
When I observe her works, I find myself like Ulysses facing the sirens of abstraction, seduced by these multiple horizons that overlap in a dizzying chromatic ballet. Simão’s compositions are not simple landscape evocations, but mental cartographies where each colored stratum corresponds to a state of consciousness. Ambiguity reigns supreme in her pictorial universe, and it is precisely this indeterminacy that constitutes its strength.
The phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty teaches us that perception is never a passive act, but an active construction where the body and mind interweave to make sense of the world. “The visible and the invisible” continually touch each other in sensory experience, and that is exactly what Simão gives us to see in her compositions. Her impossible landscapes are battlefields where our perceptual certainties dissolve like the morning mist on the hills of Minas Gerais. “The eye is not only sensitive to what is visible, but to what makes it visible,” wrote Merleau-Ponty [1], and Marina Perez Simão’s canvases perfectly embody this dialectic where the viewer actively participates in the emergence of meaning.
Let’s take the example of her exhibition “Zwielicht” at the G2 Kunsthalle in Leipzig in 2024. These immense paintings, with their fluid movements and incandescent colors, do not so much represent places as transitions between different states of consciousness. The artist plunges us into a twilight in-between, an interval where the contours of the real dissolve to make way for inner visions. It is not for nothing that “Zwielicht” means “between dog and wolf” in German – that fleeting moment when the light changes and transforms our perception of the world.
If phenomenology offers us a framework for understanding Simão’s work, the poetry of Fernando Pessoa allows us to grasp its existential dimension. The heteronymy of the Portuguese poet, this ability to fragment into multiple creative personalities, finds a striking echo in the hybrid landscapes of the Brazilian artist. Just as Pessoa wrote under different heteronyms to explore various facets of the human experience, Simão multiplies viewpoints and horizons in her compositions.
In his poem “Autopsychography”, Pessoa asserts that “the poet is a faker” who “fakes so completely that he even fakes the pain he truly feels” [2]. This mise en abyme of subjective experience resonates deeply with Simão’s approach, which invites us to navigate between different layers of reality. Her paintings are visual simulations that, paradoxically, reconnect us to authentic sensations – the dazzlement in front of a setting sun, the vertigo before the immensity of a landscape, the melancholy of twilight.
During her exhibition “Onda” at the Pace Gallery in London in 2022, Marina Perez Simão presented a series of polyptychs where organic forms seemed to continue from one panel to another, thus creating a fragmented but coherent visual narrative. This burst narrative structure is reminiscent of Pessoa’s “The Book of Disquiet”, this sprawling work composed of fragments that together draw the portrait of a consciousness in perpetual motion. “I am a fragment of a self whose entirety I do not know,” Bernardo Soares, Pessoa’s heteronym, might have written while contemplating these paintings where unity is born from fragmentation.
Marina Perez Simão’s strength lies in her ability to transform the experience of the landscape into an inner exploration. The sensual undulations of her compositions are not simple representations of hills or waves, but visual metaphors of our fluctuating states of soul. As she confided in an interview: “I break the composition to create a change of state, a promise of something beyond the painting.” This promise of a beyond, of a transcendence of the limits of the visible, is at the heart of her artistic approach.
The artist never works when she is sad – now there’s a confession worth lingering over! Contrary to the romantic myth of the tormented genius, Simão claims joy as a necessary condition for creation. “I must feel good to be in the studio,” she says. This ethic of creative happiness translates in her canvases into a particular luminosity, a chromatic vibration that tears us away from our daily morosity. Her abstract landscapes are machines for producing visual joy, optical devices that stimulate our beauty-thirsty neurons.
Simão’s training at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris certainly influenced her pictorial technique, but it is in dialogue with the Brazilian landscape that she forged her unique visual language. The vibrant colors of her paintings – these incandescent oranges, these deep blues, these twilight purples – evoke the striking contrasts of Brazilian nature. “Everything is too much,” she says about her native country, where temperatures suddenly surge, where light radically transforms the landscape depending on the time of day.
What strikes in Marina Perez Simão’s work is this constant tension between control and abandonment. Each painting is meticulously prepared through a series of watercolors and sketches, but the artist always preserves a part of improvisation in the final execution. “I don’t like too much hesitation in painting,” she affirms, “I like the direct gesture.” This gestural fluidity gives her compositions an almost musical quality, as if each color were a note in a visual symphony.
To those who would like to reduce her work to a simple variation on landscape abstraction, I reply: open your eyes wide! Simão’s art transcends easy categories and invites us to a total sensory experience. Her paintings are not windows on the world, but mirrors of our interior, portals to parallel dimensions where the laws of physics are suspended.
Critic Hettie Judah rightly observed that in Simão’s polyptychs, “something interesting happens in the space between the panels.” These interstices, these few centimeters of white wall that punctuate her works, become spaces for projection for our imagination. What happens in these breaks? A lapse of time? A movement in space? These questions without a definitive answer are an integral part of the aesthetic experience that the artist offers us.
Simão’s approach is part of a line of artists who have explored the limits between abstraction and figuration – from Georgia O’Keeffe to Helen Frankenthaler via Tarsila do Amaral. But she brings to this tradition a contemporary sensitivity, imbued with the ecological urgencies of our time. Her chemical landscapes can be read as post-apocalyptic visions, alternative worlds where nature would have reclaimed its rights after the anthropocene catastrophe.
Do not think that Marina Perez Simão is a naive artist content to produce pretty images. Her work is deeply rooted in a reflection on the possibilities and limits of painting in the digital age. In a world saturated with virtual images, her canvases affirm the irreducible presence of pictorial matter, the importance of the gesture and the body in the creative act.
When she speaks about her creative process, Simão evokes this sensation of “ignorance” that she seeks: “I must surprise myself. I must have this feeling of ignorance: What is it? Where is it?” This philosophical stance of wonder, this constant questioning in the face of the visible, is at the heart of her approach. The painter does not offer us answers, but spaces of active contemplation where our certainties dissolve.
What about her technique? The layers of paint accumulate on the canvas like geological strata, creating a depth that invites the gaze to plunge into the surface. The contrasts of matter – between smooth areas and thickenings, between transparency and opacity – add a tactile dimension to the visual experience. We want to caress these canvases as we would touch a dreamed landscape.
There is something profoundly liberating in Marina Perez Simão’s art. By blurring the boundaries between interior and exterior, between real and imaginary, she reminds us that our perception of the world is always a subjective construction, a creative process in itself. Her paintings are invitations to explore our own inner landscapes, to lose ourselves in the meanders of our consciousness.
The next time you find yourself in front of a Simão canvas, take the time to abandon yourself completely. Let your eyes wander between the colored strata, lose yourself in the sensual undulations of her compositions, breathe to the rhythm of her chromatic contrasts. Art is not made to be understood, but to be experienced – and few contemporary artists offer us an experience as intense as Marina Perez Simão.
Do not be those fickle spectators who pass in front of the paintings in search of immediate satisfaction. Be instead those intrepid travelers ready to embark on a journey towards the unknown. For this is what Simão’s work is all about: an invitation to travel, not to distant countries, but to the unexplored territories of our own sensitivity.
And if you are not capable of such openness, if you prefer to cling to your aesthetic certainties, then too bad for you! You will miss out on one of the most exhilarating visual experiences that contemporary art has to offer. Marina Perez Simão does not need your approval – her canvases will continue to radiate long after your hasty judgments have been forgotten.
- Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “The Visible and the Invisible”, Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1964.
- Pessoa, Fernando. “Autopsychography” in “Poems of Fernando Pessoa”, Christian Bourgois éditeur, Paris, 2001.
