Marina Perez Simão

During the pandemic, as a counterpoint to the quarantine lockdown, Brazilian artist Marina Perez Simão started painting seas and horizons — recreating and bringing to life everything she couldn’t see or have in that moment. A selection of this recent artistic production is compiled in Marina Perez Simão: they’re vibrant, colorful works inspired by Brazilian landscapes, which led Simão to be invited for her first solo show in New York, Tudo É e Não É, in the Pace gallery, one of the most influent galleries in the world.

Her paintings mix up day and night, sky and land, looks and wonders, challenging the material world’s geography, perceptive and harmony, and transforming confinement into freedom, chaos into comfort. In the words of Turkish critic Osman Can Yerebakan, each of these canvases “translates Simão’s observations through the window of her São Paulo atelier into liquid landscapes,” recording “her exercises with the transformation of physical restrictions of mandatory distancing into a portal leading to a freer place.”

The book, in a bilingual edition, also features an essay by American curator Diana Campbell, who states that, when the Covid-19 virus exacerbated social viruses that have devastated the planet for centuries, rendering reality even darker and more complex, Marina Perez Simão’s art “invites us to find other perspectives, exercising our capacity to ask questions and put into practice our capacity for change.”

About the artist
Marina Perez Simão was born in 1980 in Vitória (Espírito Santo, Brazil) and lives and works in São Paulo. Her work process is fundamentally based in the accumulation and juxtaposition of memories and images. When cross-referencing personal experiences with multiple sources — from areas such as philosophy, literature and journalism —, the artist collects certain narratives to edit them through pictorial means that don’t stake claim to any predefined language, but develop themselves conducted by an organic practice, combining thematic density and delicate strokes. The artist uses different techniques and mediums, such as painting, collage and sketching, to connect internal and external landscapes, composing visual journeys that walk through the abstract, nebulous unknown, and through clearings, visions and reappearances. While her works explore the complexity of signs, gazes and imagination, they don’t set a single predetermined path for understanding, but follow non-linear fluxes, opening themselves up to a constant transformation of impressions. In the territories where they lead us, we must always deal with the ineffable, the unspoken instant.

About the authors
Diana Campbell is a curator with a degree from Princeton University. Since 2010, she has worked in South and Southeast Asia, particularly in India, Bangladesh and the Philippines. Since 2013, she has acted as the artistic director of Samdani Art Foundation, in Daca, Bangladesh, and as curator-in-chief of the Dhaka Art Summit. Campbell was the artistic director of the Bellas Artes Projects, in the Philippines, a not-for-profit program promoting residences and exhibitions in Manila and Bataan, and the curator of the London Frieze Projects in its 2018 and 2019 editions. She's also chairwoman of the board of the Mumbai Art Room. Diana Campbell’s writing has been published by Mousse, Frieze e Art in America, MoMA, and other publications.

Osman Can Yerebakan is a curator and art critic, born in Turkey and based in New York. His writing has been featured in The Economist, Financial Times, New York, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, The Guardian, Artforum, and The Paris Review, among other publications. He has organized exhibits at The Clemente Center, La MaMa Galleria, Radiator Gallery, Equity Gallery, AC Institute, Center for Book Arts and Queens Museum.

Specifications
Title Marina Perez Simão
Artist Marina Perez Simão
Authors Diana Campbell, Osman Can Yerebakan
Language Portuguese and English
Page count 144
ISBN 978-65-5691-060-4
Publisher Cobogó
Size 22 x 26 cm
Format Hardcover
Year 2022