MARINA PEREZ SIMÃO

Working across oil painting, watercolor, and printmaking, Simão is known for her vibrant, lyrical compositionsexploring both interior and exterior landscapes. Through her practice, she constructs visual journeys into semi-abstract and often unknowable realms made up of organic, undulating forms. Imbued with visions and memories,Simão’s oneiric landscapes reflect her deep and enduring interest in abstraction’s power to convey ideas, concepts,and feelings that transcend language.

In the paintings for her upcoming exhibition with Pace in LA—which takes the scientific name for the nightshadesfamily of plants as its title—the artist meditates on the phenomenological effects of different conditions of light andits absence. In a departure from her past works, Simão has adopted a palette of deep, dark colors for her newlandscapes, combining multiple hues at a time to emulate the nuances of bioluminescence. Elaborating upon herrecent experimentations with traditional Florentine fresco techniques for a painting she showed this year in SãoPaulo, Simão has realized many of these landscapes at grander scales than she has ever worked in before, with twomonumental compositions each extending more than 12-feet in width. As part of her process for making thesepaintings, she experiments with forms in watercolors and smaller scales, bringing a confident intuition to her final,large-scale compositions.

Tapping into the rich material histories of murals and frescos, mediums often associated with depictions of heaven orparadise, the artist’s new large-scale works lend a distinctly experiential and transportive dimension to thispresentation. Featuring layers of color, these paintings—which seem to glow and vibrate with energy drawn from aninternal, celestial light source—speak to Simão’s unique ability to imbue her work with luminosity.

Her paintings are marked by expressive and gestural brushstrokes, which respond to one another within individualworks and across multiple compositions, giving the entire exhibition a sense of continuity and consequence withrespect to time and movement. In her tableaus that suggest caves, forests, rivers, waterfalls, and otherenvironments, Simão examines the way that light can function as a supernatural force in our experience of nature.Boundaries between interior and exterior spaces are blurred and, in some cases, obliterated in these scenes ofunreality and mystery.

Among Simão’s recent projects was her 2022 residency with Cahiers d’Art in Paris, where she presented anexhibition of watercolors.