Amid the hustle and bustle of Frieze London, where champagne bottles pop and deals are orchestrated, Brazilian abstract artist Marina Perez Simão wants to invite guests to contemplate inside a spaceship in Pace Gallery’s booth. She’s painted 11 canvases in three main colors: three in blue, three in gray, and five in magenta.
The booth is arranged in the shape of the letter X, with two blue paintings on either side, a gray painting in the middle, and two others on the other side. Guests can either enter through the middle or on the sides.
“The structure is super open and closed at the same time, but there’s also a sense of discovery depending on which side you walk through,” Simão told ARTnews, speaking from São Paulo.
She wants viewers to take the paintings in and to get real close to her work. She describes the paintings as “more or less vague descriptions of strange worlds” and says that each artwork has its own “nature and behaviors.” “It’s abstract yet it has so many elements of landscape. Nature is a big, complex and vast organism that we don’t fully understand how it works, art is a way to approach these things that are difficult to explain,” Simão said.
Simão added that she wanted to remind her viewers that looking at art is a physical experience. “We see so many images through Instagram and digital platforms, which is fine, but we can’t forget that when you get close to a painting, there are different layers and textures,” she said, noting that she hopes people see the imperfections in her art—which is one of the reasons she doesn’t varnish her paintings.
When she started these paintings at the beginning of the year, she felt a natural development in her practice was taking place, but she found that it was still inexplicable.
Her paintings are often rich and bright in colors, with sky blues sitting atop grass green or bright reds paired with orange. These new works are cooler; they draw their inspiration from Pablo Picasso’s Blue and Rose Periods and Fra Angelico’s usage of the color pink.
“Pink is a difficult color because when you look at mass culture, there’s Barbie pink, bubblegum pink, and cotton candy pink. I didn’t want all these industrial pinks and their associations,” Simão said. She instead settled on magenta, given that it can be manipulated to mimic colors found in nature.
Simão found blue more challenging. She worked with the color straight from the tube because the pigment is already super strong, only occasionally relying on a dash of white for tinting. Yet she also combined different blues, mixing cobalt and cerulean, for example, to transform them into a greenish tone. The blue paintings “are almost impossible to photograph,” Simão explained. “We had to do three sessions of photographing as the pigments change so much.”
The gray paintings combine magenta and blue. In the first layers of the paintings, she hides hints of yellow and ocher, creating an effect similar to the hazy glow created when fog passes in front of the sun. According to Simão, the blue paintings are warm like summer, and the pink paintings are cold like winter. Together, they represent an abstract season.
Simão began experimenting with darker hues in 2024 with her exhibition “Solanaceae” at Pace in Los Angeles. The show’s name was inspired by the scientific name for the nightshades family of plants and the paintings had fragments of darkness. The same silhouette appeared in a show at Mendes Wood DM’s Paris gallery later that year. “I’ve been thinking about working with a limited color range [for a while] because color in my work is super important, and I wanted to study tonalities and limit myself, I’m always evolving,” said Simão.
Simão’s paintings at Frieze London changed her artistic routine. She hid everything in her studio that featured an ounce of color and resumed her usual position of painting away from the door and by a little terrace with a window.
“I paint standing up and in my socks. I don’t use chairs and sometimes I sit on the ground. These paintings required my body to be engaged,” said Simão.