Simón’s exhibition entitled Illuminating Walks is a series of site-responsive works that took place during his residency at the Leitrim Sculpture Centre during June and July 2021. Having spent some days in studio- isolation Simón expressed the desire to travel the local area and conduct a study of the local landscape using photography, painting and drawing as his primary medium. The use of colour is a central motif permeating Simón’s work and in Illuminating Walks he was determined to shift away from the more obvious reliance and predominance of green and earth colours extracting instead a range of flat and highly charged primary colours often to be found on farm machinery and other man-made structures. Simón’s subversion of the typical landscape view is accentuated by suspended cut-out shapes that fragment as the viewer moves in front of the work. This is further echoed in his choice of subject matter; ‘the felled Sitka spruce forest’ or the ‘corrugated fragments’ of farm buildings both illuminating the landscape as a place of work and commercial activity but also a darker side of environmental change and ruination. These aspects of the landscape are further counterpointed by an explosion of colour and form that connect to the artists own encounter with the land as a positive resource for diverse life and creative collaboration. It is this intensity of feeling and sensation coupled with a sense of playful encounter that the artist will continue to explore during a workshop for local youth. The results of this workshop will sit alongside the work of the artist for the duration of the exhibition.
Exhibition curated by Séan O'Reilly.
Paco Simón
Born in Barcelona in 1954 Paco Simón studied at the School of Arts of Zaragoza where he met his partners at the Grupo Forma (1972 to 1976). After a period of intense activity with the group, he started to work with Sala Gaspar in Barcelona doing multiple exhibitions in Spain and abroad. His work became intensely colourist during this period full of eroticism and sensuality. In 1988, he set up a studio in New York, and split his time between there and his home in Zaragoza. He returned to abstraction and made large-scale paintings creating floating architectures with a restrained palette. Gradually he began to re-introduce more intense colour, making paintings where the organic and the cellular co-exist in space. Some of these paintings refer to cosmic space, others to urban, keeping the rhythm and balance of the landscape. Coloured shapes began to emerge from the surface of these paintings making them seem three-dimensional. He continues to paint, but since 1995 he has become interested also in installations where light and colour become very important. He works in different places: Israel, Australia, United States, Poland, Germany, Great Britain and since 2000 he has run the association Arte en Órbita, which has organised international cultural projects in Europe, USA, Australia and the UK.