Review: Simone Decorart

Why can't we stop looking at that painting which, apparently, says nothing to us? It's the simple pleasure of contemplating a combination of colours on a canvas, of sipping the textures of the painted surface with no greater ambition than feeding our aesthetic sense. We often insist on reaching for weighty road maps to work out the hidden meaning of an artwork, we stretch our reasoning so tight that we suffocate our aesthetic sensibility. The decorative painting of Simone Decorart is oxygen for anyone with asthma of the reason. And it needs no manual, just open your eyes and let the right hemisphere of the brain do the rest of the work.

In Marina Rosa, Simone mixes acrylics with minerals to create a special texture. It's an almost abstract seascape (like most abstract artworks), fresh and full of life. Some will see a sky and a sea, a boat and a few rays of sun, and others will only make out a magma of blues with a pink emerging from it that holds a certain melancholy. In another Marina, Simone goes for far colder tones, with an almost black sea and a stormy sky taking up much of the canvas: there are days when you fancy a bit of a storm.

Paisaje Abstracto, for its part, has more plastic vigour and its chromatic harmony is more satisfying. The landscape is rendered so vaguely that the viewer is left without figurative handholds, which strengthens the aesthetic impression: the peace of the whites and pinks in the upper half contrasts with the dark blues and, above all, with the yellow at the bottom. Along with that, the rough texture built up through successive layers and the vaporous finish of the transparent washes of colour make the aroma of this painting linger longer.

Along the same lines as Paisaje Abstracto, but with a greater economy of colour, is Sin Título, with those almost black dark blues that dominate part of the upper area of the painting and reach out like two arms, one downwards and the other dividing the surface. The rough grey comes down from one of those arms, with white dominating the rest of the surface. This composition results in a cold, tense and threatening artwork.

And if we're talking about threats, we have to mention one of the artworks from her series on methacrylate. Sin título is like a bloody nightmare, almost an apocalyptic vision with no aesthetic escape. We've become voyeurs of fear: despite the wound, we can't look away.

This series also shows Simone's interest in trying out different techniques to achieve her artistic ambitions. Here she conceives the painting as an engraving, painting the artwork backwards, from the foreground to the transparencies.

After the scarlet apocalypse, our spirit asks for a break, and in the treatment room we find Summer Afternoon, a joyful painting in vertical format in which summer and its flowers vibrate in intense, acid pinks, greens and blues.

Although Simone Art's output focuses on abstract paintings with vague figurative echoes, some of her purely figurative paintings also shine with a light of their own, like the radiant and immaculate Geisha, whose ambiguous gaze seduces but unsettles.

Just as Viuda Negra unsettles, an artwork that reminds us that behind Simone's splendidly decorative clothing there is the dark rocker Paula Segarra, an artist trained at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the San Carlos University in Valencia.

Recently we've been able to enjoy her output in solo exhibitions such as Free Flowing (Las Rozas) or at Art Fair (Málaga), which featured artworks from her series Abisales and La edad de oro del sacrificio. That confirms the versatility of an artist capable of making us hear the murmur of the waves and the song of the birds while she waits round the corner with a wicked smile and a sharpened brush, ready to plunge an aesthetic dagger into our sleepy heart.

If Simone appears as the Yang, Paula is the Yin: her (other) artworks explore the sinister side of the human being, the disturbing and the mysterious. But she explores it as far as the threshold, because you don't cross the door of mystery... unless you don't want to come back.