BOOK:Michael Simpson-Paintings and Drawings 1989-2019, Blain|Southern Publications

To coincide with his solo exhibition, Blain|Southern “New Paintings” Blain|Southern has published “Michael Simpson: Paintings and Drawings 1989-2019”. This new monograph offers a comprehensive overview of the last 30 years of Simpson’s practice with over 140 paintings and drawings alongside essays by Barry Schwabsky, Jennifer Sliwka and Mark Wallinger. Michael Simpson is an artist whose practice is characterised by a reduced palette and a distinctive vocabulary in which Benches, Confessionals and Squints are recurring motifs explored through different series of works. Whilst Simpson’s apparent subject is the infamy of religious history and the politics of belief, these subjective references provide only a subtext for his principal subject: the mechanics of painting. By focussing on the structure and formal elements of the painting, Simpson asks how a flat surface can conjure an illusion of space. And he takes that idea further to ask why we derive so much pleasure from that illusion? If illusions of physical depth propose metaphysical depth, what might that imply about the structure of our perceptions, our tendency to believe? Simpson’s ladders might suggest that there is no way to lift ourselves beyond the constraints of sense perception, and that our belief systems must be kept in check by acknowledging these limits. To look at many of Simpson’s paintings is to see-saw between abstraction and representation, between depth and flatness. The artist’s key motifs are reduced to their essential geometry and situated in similarly pared-down environments.-Dimitris Lempesis