“They are both convinced
that a sudden passion joined them.
Such certainty is beautiful,
but uncertainty is more beautiful still.”
— Wisława Szymborska
Marina Simão’s solo exhibition Amore a prima vista, curated by Mirta d’Argenzio, is dedicated to the island of Salina in the Aeolian Islands. Conceived for the spaces of Palazzo Marchetti in Malfa, it presents new site-specific works. At its core is a new suite of watercolors, which serve as the starting point for Simão’s canvases.
For Simão, Salina was love at first sight, the exhibition’s point of departure, an emotion that, for the artist, belongs to the complexity of Nature itself, emerging suddenly and taking shape as an expression of its intelligence, “a force of Nature.” That force is observed, investigated, and imagined through drawing, the practice at the heart of her research and the point of origin through which an original understanding of form and color is defined. Rooted in Kandinsky’s thinking, drawing becomes the enactment of a new pictorial semantics, and his two modes of perception, the external and the internal, recur throughout the exhibition. In Point and Line to Plane (1926), Kandinsky describes the passage between them as a symbolic movement that abandons figurative convention in favor of functional categories.
In Amore a prima vista, d’Argenzio sees artistic creation caught in the process of becoming, the boundary between inner and outer dimensions dissolving into a movement from interiority to exteriority that comes under the artist’s close observation. The drawings made for Salina were born from a desire that emerged as a sudden feeling, the Aeolian Islands embodying the unpredictability of Nature, where love at first sight becomes a specific emotion in which instinctive response and intellectual recognition occur almost simultaneously.
The language of form and color offers the interpretation of a plane of existence that abandons figurative drawing for the structures of abstract imagery. Its transition from black and white to color is fundamental, evident in the room conceived for Palazzo Marchetti, where the two dimensions are connected through drawing in a delicate interplay of monochrome and color. Painting is for the things we cannot name, when language does not help, and neither does music. “Color is something you learn over the years,” Simão reminds us. Her colored waves pass through the viewer and carry them elsewhere, toward other worlds, cosmic and interior alike.
The exhibition opens a renewed understanding of form and color, which for d’Argenzio “leads us along an equally unexplored route, a path on which to venture, lose ourselves, laugh, be afraid, believe, and ultimately run away.”
