Amid the fairground pace of Frieze London, Marina Perez Simão paintings are arranged to encourage unhurried viewing inside Pace Gallery’s booth, where the Brazilian abstractionist presents 11 canvases in three dominant palettes: three blue, three gray, and five magenta.
The presentation is built as an X-shaped environment. Two blue works anchor one side, a gray canvas sits at the center, and two additional works balance the opposite flank. Visitors can enter through the middle or the sides, creating different sightlines and a sense of gradual discovery, according to the artist.
Speaking from São Paulo, Simão said the layout feels both open and contained, and she wants viewers to step close. She describes the paintings as suggestive realms with their own temperaments. While nonfigurative, they carry strong echoes of landscape. She noted that art can approach aspects of nature that resist easy explanation.
Simão emphasized the physicality of looking. She wants audiences to notice layers and textures that get lost on screens, and she leaves surfaces unvarnished so small irregularities remain visible.
She began this body of work early in the year and sensed a natural shift in her practice, even if it felt difficult to articulate at first.
Her turn toward darker, narrower ranges began in 2024 with Solanaceae at Pace in Los Angeles, titled after the nightshade plant family. Similar forms resurfaced at Mendes Wood DM in Paris the same year. She said she has wanted to study tonal shifts within self-imposed limits, noting that color remains central as her approach continues to evolve.
Marina Perez Simão paintings and a limited palette
Known for saturated color contrasts, Simão’s new works cool the temperature. She looked to Pablo Picasso’s Blue and Rose Periods and to Fra Angelico’s use of pink. Rather than leaning into pop associations of pink, she turned to magenta for its flexibility in evoking natural tones.
Blue proved more demanding. She often used the pigment directly from the tube, occasionally lightened with white, and merged cobalt with cerulean to edge toward green. The optical depth made the blue canvases hard to document. She said multiple photo sessions were needed because the pigments shift under different conditions.
The gray works arise from mixing magenta and blue. Early layers tuck in traces of yellow and ocher, producing a muted radiance akin to fog filtering sunlight. Simão likened the blue canvases to summer and the pink to winter. Together, they suggest an abstracted season.
Her turn toward darker, narrower ranges began in 2024 with Solanaceae at Pace in Los Angeles, titled after the nightshade plant family. Similar forms resurfaced at Mendes Wood DM in Paris the same year. She said she has wanted to study tonal shifts within self-imposed limits, noting that color remains central as her approach continues to evolve.
Preparing the Frieze London works altered her studio routine. She removed anything brightly colored, worked near a small terrace window, and kept her usual stance of painting away from the door. The process was physically engaged, she said, often painting standing in socks, sometimes from the floor, to meet the scale and surfaces of the canvases up close.
Her work appears alongside other contemporary projects featured in Between Worlds: Art news, shows, and voices this week, underscoring the fair’s broader focus on abstraction and materiality.
Pace Gallery, which represents Simão, is one of several international dealers participating in Frieze London, while institutions such as the Tate and Royal Academy of Arts continue to foreground dialogues between historical and contemporary painting in the city.