Statement

Simon James loves colors: their luminosity, their diversity - but also their materiality. In Gesso he found the ideal working material for him and goes far back in art history: with this white mixture of plaster and glue, traditionally primed wooden panels and canvases in order to prepare them for oil painting. James turns this background of the pictures outside and mixes his color pigments directly into the primer.

He applies the colors brought into the gesso in a gestural-expressive manner of painting, distributes them in numerous layers on his large-format canvases, a physically intensive process. But the actual work only arises after he has put the brush down. Now James starts searching for the inner life of the picture. Like a sculptor, he works through the layers of paint with a grinding machine - from the outside back into the work. James calls it the search for the inner identity of the picture. He exposes his works in an almost archaeological process, he digs and grinds through the layers of paint as if they were earth ages, traces of memory, traces of life sunk to the bottom of consciousness. Exactly where the surface of the final work, its boundary with the outside world - that is, what we face as viewers - is only determined in this process, which is carried out with extreme precision.

James is interested in the interplay of deliberate settings as they occur in the painting process and the hidden life of the material, which is only revealed when the image is artistically investigated with the grinding machine. For him, painting and commercial work are inseparable in the process of becoming an image; the image holds surprises in store. As a result, his work is an interplay of the artist's work and the material's own life.

James' process of finding images is related to his interest in boundaries, tensions and humanity, which he examines when different materials and forms come together. These interests permeates his abstract works, whether it is monochrome colored surfaces, elements rhythmically distributed over a level or landscape compositions in which he develops zones of transition that are worked out in great detail.

As an artist who was offered a place but ruled out attending Munich’s prestigious art academy, James does not want to be associated with any art movement. While comparisons to the gestural painting of abstract expressionism are obvious, James himself has the greatest admiration for Claude Monet, with whom he has a love of color and the shimmer of his surfaces - even if, unlike Monet, James would never paint outdoors. He prefers to paint and grind in the studio, all for himself and in close interaction with his work.