Opening: Thursday, May 16th, 6 – 10 pm

The visual field is vast, hugely vast, but it tends to be thoughtful. When engaging in the exercise of observing, we attend to the subtle variations of light, the gradations of the wind, how shadow casts itself, how transparency occurs, realizing that sameness may appear differently at every gaze. The same colour hue becomes another hue of that very colour as light penetrates matter in a movement of distances and proximities with the observer. As it engages in a contemplative exercise the mind can become empty and be briefly permeated by a feeling of plenitude, awe, interconnectedness and primordiality. The usual rulers of space, time, form and colour, which make reality visible, are strict and considered reliable, accurate, stable, but they can also ossify and obfuscate vision. Sound and smell inhabit referential fields whose spirit is mutable and ethereal. Which is perhaps why they appeal to emotion in a sudden manner, tearing beyond the skin towards the visceral. They do not follow the same rules, cannot be described with the same words, cannot be kept in the same archive of mental images. They are an amorphous record. Artists keep formless records. They translate images of interiority. Abstraction builds reality while questioning it. Works are like points of light, fissures on the fertile ground of the artistic cosmos.

These works are points of light. In them, we access points of luminosity. Ultimately, visual artistic language is a translation of light and shadow. The subject might be just a pretext. The unsaid might be the very core. It is the core. That which is sought. That which dissociates. Fire and earth, air and water are complementary and dissonant. There are symbioses and complex (ergo fruitful) intercommunicating relationships, there is just enough balance and context, whose tension reveals the real and thrilling ambiguity of the awe-inspiring silent line. Everything offers a context and shadow prefers to reveal itself at night, but some of us experience the night during daytime. There are fleeting encounters, as well as repetitions in the sequence of days. On some days the large is seen in the small through the arithmetic of simple gestures. The large conceals itself. It does not want to be fully revealed. But painting reveals itself fully in its omission. Painting is the threshold of vision’s absolute impossibilities. To get vision back it is necessary to contemplate the void. Reality is fallacious, and we find truth in fallacy. Painting is an invitation to non-sense. But it feeds on symbols and meanings. Wherever there is contradiction the soil is more alive. Painting is alive. And that is part of the artistic gesture.

This text-thought was written after a visit to Isabel Simões’ studio in Penha de França, in Lisbon. The ideas it deals with are not intended to be universal premises; they establish a discrete, personal relationship with the work of the artist featured here. Abismo mínimo [‘Minimal abyss’] will be shown through 29th June 2024 at (Projectspace), a collaboration between Jahn und Jahn and Encounter galleries at Rua de São Bernardo 15.

Carolina Trigueiros

The work of Isabel Simões (Lisbon, 1981) is presented in various types of supports (painting, drawing, performance) that are affected by the spaces they inhabit and by a relation of scale and place with the viewer’s moving body. Object-images are built within the process of painting, deriving from images captured from everyday spaces and objects – “excuses” for taking different features of the relation with the visible and the sensory as an intuitive field of action – delaying, pointing out or subverting meanings. Simões has a degree in Painting – Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon, and has been showing her work since 2003. In 2011 was a resident artist at Künstlerhaus Bethanien (João Hogan - Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian Grant).

The following exhibitions can be highlighted: Vistas Para o avesso do mar (Artíssima, Turim, 2022), Tisanas (Centro de Arte e Cultura Fundação Eugénio de Almeida, Évora, 2022), Gravity and grace and Humor (Galeria Bruno Múrias, Lisbon, 2022 and 2019), Divagar Devagar (Córtex Frontal, Arraiolos, 2021), Portugal Em Flagrante – Operação 2 (CAM, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, 2016), An Oblique Fiction (Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 2011), Unfolding: Space (Grimmuseum, Berlin, 2011), O Museu em Ruínas (António Cachola Collection – MACE, Elvas, 2009), Prémio Fidelidade Mundial Jovens Pintores (Culturgest, Lisbon, 2007), Blame de city (Módulo, Lisbon, 2006), 7 Artistas ao 10o Mês (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, 2005), Expanded Painting (2nd Prague Biennial, Prague, 2005).