Marina Perez Simão

On view from January 20 to March 2, 2024, the show, titled Solanaceae, will bring together some 15 canvases of various sizes—including monumental panoramas—created by the artist in the past year. Solanaceae will mark Simão’s first-ever solo presentation in LA and, more broadly, on the West Coast of the United States, and the exhibition will coincide with the 2024 edition of Frieze LA. It will be accompanied by a new catalogue from Pace Publishing, featuring a foreword by the gallery’s Curatorial Director Kimberly Drew as well as an original essay by SCAD Museum of Art Assistant Curator Brittany Richmond.

In the paintings for her upcoming exhibition with Pace in LA—which takes the scientific name for the nightshades family of plants as its title—the artist meditates on the phenomenological effects of different conditions of light and its absence. In a departure from her past works, Simão has adopted a palette of deep, dark colors for her new landscapes, combining multiple hues at a time to emulate the nuances of bioluminescence. Elaborating upon her recent experimentations with traditional Florentine fresco techniques for a painting she showed this year in São Paulo, Simão has realized many of these landscapes at grander scales than she has ever worked in before, with two monumental compositions each extending more than 12-feet in width. As part of her process for making these paintings, 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 or paradise, the artist’s new large-scale works lend a distinctly experiential and transportive dimension to this presentation. Featuring layers of color, these paintings—which seem to glow and vibrate with energy drawn from an internal, 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 individual works and across multiple compositions, giving the entire exhibition a sense of continuity and consequence with respect to time and movement. In her tableaus that suggest caves, forests, rivers, waterfalls, and other environments, 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 of unreality and mystery.

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

Marina Perez Simão (b. 1980, Vitória, Brazil) has developed a working process based fundamentally on the accumulation and juxtaposition of memories and images. By combining personal experiences and multiple references stemming from fields such as philosophy, literature, and journalism, the artist collects certain narratives in order to edit them through pictorial means that do not belong to any predefined language; rather, they develop with an organic practice, which combines thematic density and a delicate treatment.

Simão uses a variety of techniques, such as collage, drawing, and oil painting, as starting points in order to marry interior and exterior landscapes, she composes visual journeys that sometimes traverse the unknown, the abstract and the nebulous, but also include visions and memories. Simão’s work is held in several public collections worldwide, including the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Saint-Étienne in France, The Ekard Collection in the Netherlands, and the Samdani Art Foundation in Bangladesh, as well as the Speed Art Museum in Kentucky and the University of Chicago in the United States.