Continuing through January 31, 2026
“You that seek what life is in death,
Now find it air that once was breath.”
So begins the sonnet “Caelica 83” by the 16th century baron Brooke Fulke Greville.
Maybe it’s the theme of metamorphosis, the vision of weightlessness, or the reach for what lies beyond the normal limits of perception. But Greville’s lines were brought to mind by six paintings by Simone Simon, who transmutes images from deep consciousness into radiant atmospheric abstractions.
Much as the sonnet form dictates a certain rhyme scheme, metrical regularity, and number of lines, Simon brings a self-imposed set of formal conditions to her work. The paintings here are all acrylic on canvas, either 48? by 48? or 72? by 72?. Each contains two colored forms, mingling, mutating, and slow dancing together.
The works from 2023 feature a dark indigo underpainting. “Ushered In” pairs a yellow cloud gusting toward its aquamarine counterpart. Both are tinged with analogous colors. They commingle briefly in a spangled patch of yellow-green. Where they converge with the indigo backgrounds, a rosy fog emerges. Simon makes ample use of glazes, splatters, the weave of the canvas, and the flow of thinned paint. The effect is of light streaming through a gossamer veil. Her yellows especially are dazzling. In “Trap Door” a blinding yellow nimbus countervails the white form from which it emerges.
The contrast of each color activates the tension between their duality and integration that is a central feature throughout the series. The title lends a sense of falling and of weight pushing down from the bright light above to soft cotton beneath.
The other four canvases, all dated 2025, employ warmer and higher-keyed color. In “Indweller” two tangerine clouds, one lined in pink, waft towards each other. The forms in “The Leaping of Octaves” have consolidated and the hues — oranges and yellows — become more defined. (Simon pulls this and others among the rather distracting titles from thoughts, dreams, feelings about nature, or even the podcasts she listens to in the studio.)
These new paintings differ from the earlier work by their thicker stretcher bars and painted side edges. The recent paintings thus have a more pronounced presence as material objects. The drifts of color at center stage have become less varied and, despite their glowing color, offer fewer painterly pleasures.
Presumably this pictorial shift stems from the artist’s faithfulness to a creative process engaged with her deep-mind phenomena. Simon speaks of dreaming whole bodies of work, of deriving form from sensation, of venturing beyond the realm of everyday senses. This hallucinatory insight originates with visions resembling synesthetic perceptions that some people perceive in the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep. As she pours and layers paint, she attempts to remember and engage with what she has experienced. The effect is numinous.
Each resulting image feels self-contained, its drifts of color unlikely to stray or expand beyond the square format. Indeed, Simon conceives of each canvas as an integral arena in which to capture and store gestures and light. Her use of the term arena recalls critic Harold Rosenberg’s description of the Abstract Expressionist action painter’s canvas as “an arena in which to act” and of what went into it as “not a picture but an event.” Simon’s own creative lineage traces to the Romantic period, with its concept of the artist as a visionary who experiences life more profoundly and more intensely than most other people and whose art reveals a felt subjectivity.
Like much Romantic art, Simon’s is transitory. Astir in color and light, everything is dissolving and becoming. The effect is quasi-cinematic. Viewers can’t help but imagine what will happen next, however fleeting and ungraspable. Her paintings ask that we awaken our imaginations, lose track of time, and discover what we will — a pursuit not unlike cloud-gazing. It’s an appealing prospect at this dark, chilly, and often harried time of year.
