Marina Perez Simão – Tuning Fork

Marina Perez Simão – Tuning Fork A citrus yellow swells over a piercing blue, both crossed by a grayish swirl of medium timbre that meets an astringent mass of violet. The senses are disoriented, and the painting is composed like a piece of music, with color theory as its tuning fork. A sensory wave hits us all at once, unannounced, especially when the painting is large in scale – and even more so when we face not just one, but several canvases at once. The way Marina Perez Simão approaches scale, composition, and movement invites us into a synesthetic relationship with color. As our gaze sinks into the chromatic expanse of her works, we are swept up by fluid suggestions of temperature, vibration, and taste: a visual, tactile, acoustic, and olfactory/gustatory experience, from which memories and reactions emerge directly on the skin, in the ears, through the strands of hair. The exhibition Marina Perez Simão – Tuning Fork was conceived as a space to immerse oneself in the experience of her painting. The iconic curve of Instituto Tomie Ohtake’s largest gallery has been extended into a wave that spills outward, confounding our usual perception of the room. At the heart of the exhibition, Marina offers a new series of tall canvases that together embrace the visitor. To reach them, we pass by key examples of her earlier works, as well as the first public presentation of a large group of her watercolors. Along this path, it becomes clear that the artist challenges the rationalist tendency to separate thought from embodiment. Instead, she seeks cracks within the medium of painting itself – where she spreads out in search of flavors, sonorities, cadences, and warmths. Having devoted a significant part of her formative years to the study of composition and drawing, Marina came to realize that beneath the skin of figures, narratives, and scenes in great works of art lie curves and undulations, modulations and inclinations that stir the gaze even before any figuration is recognized. Later, as she experimented with ways to absorb the shocking (yet paradoxically disposable) images of terror and war around her, she found that sustaining her gaze for longer would lead her to a shift in focus – diving into the grain and texture of the observed sign’s temperature, which would dissolve into stain and pulse. Then, while investigating iridescent pigments and translucent fabrics – uncommon materials in painting – she encountered the ethereal, spacious quality of chromatic atmosphere. From mid-2018 onward, Marina Perez Simão converged these discoveries into a single practice that continues to expand through her multicolored paintings. Oil paint is a viscous, slow-drying, partially reversible medium that can be saturated with pigment. With it, she paints in broad gestures – not necessarily fast, but consistent in their confidence, as evident in the continuous brush marks they leave behind. Each color, chosen and prepared before touching the canvas, defines a field, a wave, an organ of the painting, which juxtaposes or overlaps other fields, resonating in unison without dissolving or merging. In this way, a painting takes form – not just as an image, but as a material presence that reflects light intensely, stimulating the senses. The mesmerizing effect of each painting lies in the proportions between areas of color, as well as in the tonal proximities and distances within their dynamics of complementarity. Though born of fluid gestures, the result is one of calculation, contemplation, and precision, so that shapes and colors yield tunings, chords, and counterpoints. If each canvas is like an orchestrated symphony, its whistled rehearsal begins in sketchbooks and watercolor studies. Dozens of watercolors precede each series of oil paintings: a way to sharpen the eye, articulate compositions and rhythms, imagine color encounters, visualize scenes and spatialities. It’s a challenge, because at that stage everything is plausible, yet nothing is likely. The passage into painting goes beyond mere translation – not just due to differences in scale, intensity, and materiality, but also because, in the simultaneous creation of multiple canvases throughout the studio, the combinatory relationship between them gains tangibility. Indeed, an exhibition of large-scale paintings enhances the contrasts and echoes between the sonorities of each image. In this show, the exhibition design accentuates that effect through two particular traits of the current group of works. First, there’s a multiplication of color hues within each composition – some combining a dozen or more colors, in addition to the nuances created by zones of transition and contagion amid shapes. Second, there is great variation in the forms and rhythms of each work, which challenges the understanding of the ensemble as a single series, favoring instead the harmony of disparate melodies, united by recurring visual chords that reappear in unexpected places and roles. Beyond its sensory impact, this body of work destabilizes us through its variation and complexity. It now seems possible to steady the synesthetic flow by associating the paintings with recognizable forms within a narrative frame. It is common to link Marina Perez Simão’s pieces to fragments of landscape. For those who need to name what they see, everything must be something; thus, this must be a mountain, that a river, over there, a sun. And the whole – surely, a landscape: the quintessential synesthetic idea, more expansive, older, and more complex than any human artifact or technique. But is that really what Marina Perez Simão’s painting is? Does the association of these forms, colors and sensations with landscape elements bring us closer to what the artist produces – or do they, instead, offer a means of distancing ourselves, interrupting the disorienting physical connection to the painting’s materiality and pulse? The mind draws connections – whether we like it or not – but it’s important to resist the comfort of naming lakes and valleys. We will see landscapes, but we must remember they may or may not belong to this time or planet; they may be from far-off corners of the universe, on scales either microscopic or vast, from within the mind or spirit, from imaginary places, distant pasts, or futures yet to come. In truth, it is where words falter that the senses become most acute. It is this territory – beyond the reach of discourse – that Marina Perez Simão approaches in her paintings. And it is there that she invites us. We may remain on the outside, observing and naming what we can, but the invitation here is to enter, to leave explanations at the door, and to move through the space using vision as an eager, tactile, vibrating sense. Vision as tuning fork. Paulo Miyada Curator

Untitled, 2024, oil on linen, 19.7 x 23.6 in.