ART-PREVIEW:Sonia Gomes & Marina Perez Simão

Two leading Brazilian artists, Sonia Gomes and Marina Perez Simão present works at Pace Gallery. Sonia Gomes combines secondhand textiles with everyday materials, such as furniture, driftwood, and wire, to create abstract sculptures that reclaim Afro-Brazilian traditions and feminized crafts from the margins of history. Marina Perez Simão 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.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Pace Gallery Archive

An exploration into the ambiguity of abstraction, the presentation “Sonia Gomes  Marina Perez Simão” features five recent and historical sculptures by Gomes, nine new paintings by Perez Simão, and the artists’ first collaborative piece, synthesizing their distinct aesthetics as a singular whole employing oil paint and embroidery. Inspired by the environment and past of their native Brazil, the works on display evoke landscapes poised between the chimerical and historical, as well as the personal and collective, while pointing to the dialogue between literature and the visual arts.  Celebrated internationally for her abstract sculptures combining secondhand textiles with everyday materials, such as furniture, driftwood, and wire, Sonia Gomes   is a barrier-breaking figure as the first living Afro-Brazilian woman artist to have a monographic show, Sonia Gomes: Still I Rise, at the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), in 2018. Through their tensile, slack and contorted forms, works such as “Cordão dos Mentecaptos” [Cord of the Insane] (2016) exude an enigmatic vitality and organicity suggestive of both the human body and Brazil’s flora and fauna. Her practice actively reclaims Afro-Brazilian traditions as well as feminized crafts from the margins of history. Her recurrent use of bird cages, as seen, for instance, in “Vôo” [Flight] (2014), operates as a potent allusion to emancipatory struggles and the poetry of Maya Angelou, whose verses inspired the title and premise of Gomes’s momentous solo exhibition at MASP. Juxtaposing tensile and slack forms, Gomes’s contorted sculptures exude a corporeality and dynamism that she attributes to her love of popular Brazilian dances. At the same time, her work’s vitality evokes the enigmatic animism of sacred objects used in the spiritual practices of Brazil’s African diaspora—rites that the artist witnessed her grandmother, a shaman, perform during her childhood. Born in the Brazilian city of Caetanópolis, a once-important manufacturing center for textiles, Gomes uses found or gifted fabrics, which, according to her, “bring the history of the people that they belonged to.” “I give a new significance to them,” she adds. Her assemblages thus tie Brazil’s historical trajectory to the long-disregarded narratives of women, people of color, and countless anonymous individuals. Through its recycling of used fabric, Gomes’s work also evinces a principle of thrift that is both a consequence of Brazil’s rapid and uneven industrial development and a dissenting answer to its accompanying culture of wasteful consumption and environmental destruction. As a whole, her art is marked by a decolonizing impulse, providing oblique responses to the social inequities and ecological urgencies of present-day Brazil and, more broadly, a globalized world. At the cusp between abstraction and figuration, the paintings of Marina Perez Simão present fluid forms in subtle chromatic harmonies that conjure the auratic and transformational qualities of luminous, open vistas without ever depicting any specific place in explicit detail. Reveling in their ambiguity and harnessing the power of suggestion, canvases, such as “Untitled (2020, 19 ¾ x 15 ¾ in)”, “Untitled (2019, 72 ½ x 52 ¾ in)” and “Untitled (2020, 57 1/8 x 52 ¾ in)”, operate like the poetry that inspires Perez Simão: they evoke the sensations, moods, and rhythms of memories and places, rather than dispatch clear-cut messages in overt terms. When seen as a group, her works can formally rhyme and thereby intimate loose storylines—an indirect consequence of the artist’s approach to working on multiple canvases at once. “I feel that there is a sort of narrative in my paintings,” Perez Simão explains, “Passing from one element to the next is very important to me, the fluidity and ambivalence.” In this way, Perez Simão opens her work to the interpretational creativity of the viewer and thumbs the gap between representation and language, the lived and the said, the palpable and invisible. 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 leads us into territories in which we are confronted with that which is ungraspable, with that elusive and unspeakable instant that poets strive so hard to capture with their words.

Info: Pace Gallery, 68 Park Place, East Hampton, Duration: 3-27/9/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-18:00, Sat 12:00-17:00, www.pacegallery.com