🎨 Studio Visit: Simón Sepulveda
A visit with a Chilean artist whose work ruminate on the line between partying and protest.
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I met Simón Sepulveda via Sina Sohrab, who mentioned that he was holding open studios during the art fair week in Madrid. After poking around some on Instagram, I was able to track Simón down to verify that he was indeed having open studios — and if he would be interested in me and Bobby stopping by. He was! And the timing and location worked out perfectly as he was available right before our meeting with Roberto Rivadeneira, who was just a few blocks south: the divine hand at work, one could say.
After popping by Sabrina Amrani, we made our way to Simón’s studio through the rain, walking behind a couple who kept going up the same streets as us. Were they also visiting the studio? Yes and no, as they went into the same building which was very clearly an artist studio and which had only one person inside: Simón. The two we were trailing were artists Cristobal Ascensio Ramos and Catara Rego, who have the space in the back — and who we did a visit with after. But first, we got to know Simón’s work, after quickly finding out that we had an unknown Barcelona overlap given that he was quite new to the city, after some time in the states, in New York and San Francisco, where he still does some work along with his home country of Chile.
The first thing that was quite clear was Simón is of a certain class of Millennial painters whose work use illustrative techniques and approaches to painting, to take surroundings and ideas of the world that are translated through bright colors and bold scenes, an approach that recalls that of Constance Tenvik or Aldo Urbano. Sharp and soft angles flow out of each other, body parts that merge and overlap, animals and plants popping in and out, creating the feeling of activity, that people are making something: for Constance, they might be having a party while, for Aldo, they might be making magic — but Simón’s scenes are more concerned with political activity or, at least, what happens when people get together to do something radical. From marching to volunteering to literally doing nothing, these are what his most recent body of work are about, the sharing time and space together in the service of using desire as a radical force. Unsurprisingly, one of the works we saw was called Fiesta y Protesta, a two panel piece from 2024 where people gather around to smoke and drink and hang and yell and live despite riot police, despite forces of nature. Tongues hang loose, ready to lick or taunt, as horses and riot dogs gather around tables and palm trees to share in the haze of organized disogranizing or disorganized organizing: either works.
In smaller formats, Simón pushes into these pieces to take a character from these large-scale images to get a peek into their psyche and their world: a person licks their phone to taste or to offer a servicing; a horse cries at the sight of a flower, who gets to live in nature, as the flower sympathizes with the horse who works for the police; someone offers a cigarette, or ashes as they point, as a flower grows out of the pocket or was perhaps place there to honor someone. On the outside of the canvas, silver badges extend the images like thought bubbles — a snake, a star, a flower — to help express what these creatures are trying to say. A thought bubble for the thought bubble.
These paintings bridge where his work is coming from and where it’s going. Simón showed us a series of tables he had painted and recently showed, which were all set with fruits and candles and other proof of life that are all taking on a life of their own. These are all the props for the play of gathering and, as they wait, they make do with what they have. They, like the toys in Toy Story, come to life to ensure they aren’t wasted, that they have meaning too. These tables are the setting with which the partying and protesting happen, you could say. But after the partying and protesting? You’re able to leave it all behind, going to a utopic place where doing nothing is the highest form of something. Recalling everything from The Nap Ministry to Black Power Naps to How to Do Nothing, he paints people and post-people atop small islands, smoking and reading and drinking and always laying about. A bird-woman sits naked, spread over her company, a man slouches to take a break from his book, a person rises out of the sea from the ashes of someone’s cigarette, to join in on resting as resistance: such is the life that we want to live but aren’t able too. If we can’t have what we want, what we should be able to have as people on a planet that is to be enjoyed instead of squandered, we’ll have dream about it, paint about it, protest to make that happen. We’ll make models of what that time will look like, how we will be once we are free.
That’s what Simón’s work is all about: making plans, acting on plans, and getting to enjoy what you have. His paintings clearly manifest this, as do his banners and blankets that take weaving processes and create flags and murals that get these ideas out in perhaps more literal ways. But can’t a painting be a flag? A slogan? A rallying cry? An invitation to a party? These things take different forms but ultimately are saying the same thing.
Explore more of Simón Sepulveda’s work on his website and Instagram.