Marina Perez Simão's 'Prima del paesaggio' at Palazzo Marchetti, Malfa

The exhibition 'Prima del paesaggio. Marina Perez Simão e la nascita del visibile' (Before the Landscape: Marina Perez Simão and the Birth of the Visible) opened at Palazzo Marchetti in Malfa, on the island of Salina, Italy. Curated by Mirta d'Argenzio, the show was conceived as a response to the artist's encounter with Salina, where the island becomes a perceptual condition for painting. Perez Simão's work explores the moment when form is still unstable, where relief, atmosphere, vegetation, water, and volcanic matter coexist as transforming perceptual states. The exhibition draws on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Henri Maldiney, and the line theory of Tim Ingold, as well as dialogues with Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Etel Adnan, Emma Kunz, Brice Marden, and Georges Didi-Huberman. A site-specific mural intervention traverses the architecture of Palazzo Marchetti, treating the wall as a field of transformation. Watercolors created during her time on Salina function as a laboratory of perception. The show positions Perez Simão within the history of abstraction, emphasizing her focus on the genetic threshold of the image. In a culture dominated by fast visual production, her painting restores time for attention and slow perception. The exhibition includes a 2026 watercolor on paper, 'Untitled', courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, Brussels, Paris, New York. The article was published on segnonline.it.