Making the invisible visible.
In her recent work, Joao Simoes-Brown magnifies details of architecture, observed in the urban landscape, where myths and reality occasionally overlap. The architectural details act as mirrors for her inner feelings of confusion, loss and unease in a very specific moment in time and space: London post-referendum; home for the past three decades, was it the city that became alien overnight - or was it her? Foundations shaken, wheel of fortune shifts; love is loosing ground, the unknown remains unknown, and darkness demands to be embraced and painted.
“Everything vanishes around me, and works are born as if out of the void” Paul Klee.
Joao’s works speak of a liminal space, semi-conscious, where echoes of ancient sunken cities resonate. It is a space where external and internal transformation happens, where questions about identity arise: in her Watchers series, she makes us look at contrasting gazes of protection and surveillance, dreamlike stone allegories and concrete artificial devices, details only too easy to miss. She depicts a vanishing symbolic language, against a backdrop of data and reflections on metal and glass.
Who are the watchers?
On the brink of a sea-change, new myths are inevitably being forged. How will they shape us? What are the shapes still perceived when the scaffolding is raised? What emerges when the scaffolding is removed?
Joao’s process as a painter adopts this persistent doing and undoing: sponges are just as indispensable as paintbrushes. She uses acrylic paints and more recently has been incorporating ink in her work. The fluidity of the ink traces aleatory forms, sometimes words, on the canvas where the invisible appears - as in her Foundation Series. Her search for textures runs in parallel with her storytelling. French graph paper, the grid on which she learned how to write, surfaces in some of her works, namely the Foundations series, where it literally is and becomes a starting point.
Our Story
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