MARÍAJOSÉ DE SIMÓN

Unrevealed dreams.

Antonio Espinoza. 

Ciudad de México, October of 2015

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Stranger! There are inscrutable dreams and dark language, and not all that they announce to men is fulfilled. Homer

What could I love but the enigma?

Giorgio de Chirico

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Wolfgang Paalen defined the term "prefiguration" to refer to the capacity of a certain type of painting to express potential forms, forms that are not yet such. True painting, according to the late Austrian master, has the capacity to prefigure a new state of things, to project itself from the present and with the accumulated richness of the past, towards the future, through the weapon of imagination. The poetics of an abstract-informal nature that have been practiced for a long time can be understood under the Paalenian parameters. Informalism is a form of expression that naturally eliminates any figurative reference to highlight in the two-dimensional support the reality of colors and strokes in the game of the creative act. However, in this type of work, the viewer can often register figurative associations, representative elements that are often deliberate.

Painting is a language, it is an art that, by its very nature, is a representation; a representation that cannot refuse to say, to express. Even abstract art (an art of pure invention, emotion, and feeling) expresses something. Can an abstract artist strip themselves of the visual experiences that over time have accumulated in their memory? I have always believed that such a thing is impossible. Even when an artist has voluntarily decided to go into the labyrinths of the informal and to orientate their work towards problems of color, form, and rhythm, there will always be in their work elements related to visual experiences that have marked them or unconscious elements that emerge from within.

Abstract-informal painter, María José de Simón (Santander, Spain, 1963) affirms that her work comes from the deepest part of her being, from the space of freedom that harbors dreams. Her painting undoubtedly proves her right. The painter knows that in the formal game of lyrical abstraction, anything goes: chance, emotion, gestural impulse, passionate subjectivity... Owner of a good pictorial kitchen (sandblasting, sgraffito, stains, accents), she puts her means and her obsessions at the service of existential reflection. In her oneiric adventure, she does not overflow in the manner of action painting, but resorts to more controlled configuration schemes, seeking to maintain the support of figurative references that the spectator is called upon to interpret.

María José de Simón does not intend at any time to represent reality, to recreate the visible, but in her informalist game, she invites us to let our imagination fly and guess what is in her painting. In Paalenian terms, potential forms that prefigure a new state of things, stony structures that foreshadow a possible world? The truth is that we do not know: María José de Simón's painting is presented to us as something indecipherable. I believe that the only certainty we can have in front of the pictorial and graphic work of this author is that we are in front of one more creative enigma. What can we do? What can we say? Perhaps the best thing to do is to opt for discreet silence and the enjoyment of aesthetic contemplation.