A Palimpsest Of The Unseen
ESSAY
The photographer can discover a wealth of detail through his pictures, but only what’s on the surface. The painter can look deeper into reality because appearances are less constrictive to someone who creates the world with every stroke of their brush. Such has become the purview, in very certain terms, of Steve Simpson, a painter whose working life as a photographer left huge gaps in the world to fill. Simpson expresses the hidden structures that underlay reality. His new solo exhibition “Maximum Microbial,” on view from February 19 to May 12, 2024 at The LeCroy Gallery of The New York Hall of Science, connects a body of original signification to traditions of abstract thinking that recall Kandinsky and Cubism. Simpson presents an exemplary model of how the evolution of structural thinking initiates a contemporary mediation with the creative process and its resulting gestalt.
The artist’s curiosity is the main source of his future accomplishment. Whatever subject draws his attention will invariably consume his days. For Steve Simpson that has consistently been the unseen world, with endless layers of meaning. Simpson peers into the tiny universes contained in living materials, seeing in them worlds worth depicting. He realizes immanent structures that end up serving eternal truths. The mind can conceive of more than it merely sees. Yet the definition of things is not their complete value. It is only a tertiary destination, a levelling off point at which certain assignations can be made.
Simpson paints the myriad levels down to an Nth degree of human comprehension. His paintings depict the samples on hand; the degrees of scrutiny; the details of structural integrity; the channel flow between parts of the whole; the exit point where they may be rationally linked one to the other; the changes that may accelerate materials into modes of crisis; and the elementary particles undergoing translation by the simple introduction of light, heat, or agitation. Simpson addresses our unconscious desire to understand the macro relationship of humanity with technology through exploring the micro aspect of both. His work closes the divide between makers and discoverers, allowing us to become embroiled in the same adventure. The painter in love with science is nothing new. Leonard da Vinci was both. Certainly other modern and postmodern artists have explored the profound relationship between creativity and levels of knowledge that expand human consciousness along with an accrual and factual knowledge. Reality at an extreme level of microbial grounding is both useful and existential.
Taken en masse, Simpson’s paintings represent an embodied study of how everything in the universe from the distant to the immediate signals an element of rudimentary daily life altering its material existence--from a crack in the ground to a pot of boiling water to sunlight filtering through and heating a muddy puddle in the street-- enters not only into a symbolic order with meaning for each of us, but also, an in some final consequence, an aesthetic repercussion that also alters our world rationally and emotionally. Simpson leads an inspired exploration through the very elementary aspects of our lives, creating a palimpsest of the unseen.
DAVID GIBSON is a freelance writer in the arts. He is available to write essays for monographs, exhibition catalogs, text for web sites, grant and residency applications, and to provide critical thinking in matters of portfolio development, studio practice, and professional etiquette. He can be contacted at davidgibsonwriting@gmail.com