Our dog-eyes Marina Perez Simão

I was born mathematician, wizard 
I was born poet. 
The cross on the forehead 
The dry laugh 
The scream 
I discover myself king 
Sequined by shadow 
The knives punching  
Time and sensibility 

– Hilda Hilst 


Mendes Wood DM is pleased to present the fourth individual exhibition of the artist Marina Perez Simão at the gallery. Having as starting point a research about painting, the artist investigates the limits and disruption between what is said and what is lived, and how the fractioned histories and realities construct the narrative. 

Intending situations of conflict in a historical, geopolitical and philosophical sphere under a foreign look, her works allow readings that are sometimes abstract and dissonant with the reality of the landscapes portrayed, a changing reality at any moment, beyond the image. A lie told often enough becomes the truth but telling a truth a thousand times makes it questionable, this territory of vulnerability is the main point of the artist's exhibition. The uncertain border between chaos and order in the landscape is developed in a research of composition and a study of colors that propose to the images an unknown nature, being able to displace who looks at them to another planet or to a desert explosion. 

The personification of this unknown place, a relation of observation not only of the structural points of the landscape but the personality and feeling of that place is a concern of Simão. Through the composition of images using painting as a mean and not the final result of the study, her work discusses a movement between the cartesian plan and the holistic plan within the landscape. Abstaining from a need to create meaning for these conflicts, the artist transfers the images beyond a factual context. On touching something immaterial, seeing from another point of view, filling with emptiness, provoking the language of silence and alternating between the limits of origin and ruin.