Water in the country 
meander behind glass (2010). Oil on canvas. 80 x 80 cm. There are artists whose work is similar enough to the building of worlds, often at odds with the world in which we live every day, and others whose work is rather a particularly intense and sensitive to inhabit the world every day have, as a gift to them. William Simon
belongs to the latter category. And this is due, if any, to the privilege of living in a particular daily scenario: the territory of the Ria de Villaviciosa. A beautiful country that contains all possible forms of water from the bravery of the open sea to the sleepy water seeps between the strut and Rodiles and goes up the valley inroads.
But the essential thing here is the way they live, painting, there. It is not, without more, mechanically recording its natural beauty, which by itself provides grounds for any landscape more or less anecdotal and superficial (including the mental landscape of mere naked eye), but to see how the exterior landscape provides a mirror and a repertoire of images that have tuned tune-always-with the inner landscape of who is painting and, ultimately, who sees the picture. At the end of the day, Simon is a romantic painter, in the primary and generic sense that his painting seeks to harmonize the vibration of the interior and exterior through the representation of a nature equally involved in these two areas. And the key element in the natural landscape, where the water, the agent models the geographical landscape of the estuary of Villaviciosa in the same way that models the sensitivity of the painter and the specific features of his work.
can say, Consequently, water is the constant motive of the work of William Simon, although it would be more accurate to say that water is the half of his painting, much as it can be pictorial material itself. Or much as you can be, in another sense, the half which develops its own life. Therefore, any production can be seen as a permanent transfer, a transfer, in the strict sense of the experience of the landscape to landscape painting, but not necessarily by the expression of subjectivity through the recreation of the natural setting but by insisting on a common intermediate. Water is a solvent, vehicle, Configurable Power. It drinks the sensitivity of the painter and it is diluted in a personal and constant cycle, as circular, uninterrupted water and the same cycle.
From the invariable principle, the different stages of the work of William Simon can be seen as a work in progress pictorial cartography, the gradual lifting of a map that is recorded gradually throughout the physical Villaviciosa estuary and which have gone, and no doubt will be happening locations and scales, from the record almost microscopic plant life and geological traces the rocky shore and shallow waters to the landscape open decidedly sublime breath, which hosts the movements of the ocean and the atmosphere beyond the mouth of the estuary.
Now it traced the paths of inland water, laugh in, leaving, however, to keep an eye on that horizon Cantabrian that Simon was opened strongly in his individual exhibitions. In this new live shows, therefore, two very contrasting that under a certain compulsion narrative could be seen as beyond: on the one hand, the stormy sea, agitated by waves or compressed under swollen skies whose turbulence rather than merely stormy proportions refers to something from Genesis, a world in training (or perhaps its collapse), on the other hand, the series of works directly referred to in the title, which includes the newest and novel views in which the water is still, is channeled on the sinuosity the meandering and sets a melancholy calm world (which could well be the calm after those storms).
Riada (2010). Oil on canvas. 89 x 160 cm.
Something has to do with the set of all these works, the experience of storms and flooding that hit last year some parts of Asturias, and which are directly referred to in some Parts of the first series. Here Simon is more rapturously romantic, delivered vis a vis the expression of the sublime through a more emphatic and seemingly random matter, full of accidents, spills, breaches of any hint of shape other than what excellence report: sea, sky, horizon. In some of these pieces, dipped in silver, blue and vibrant red, his work certainly achieves the highest level of communion with remote master, as Turner, and other recent as Kiefer. But that becomes dramatic subtlety, vaporous and mystery on the road crosses the water cooler in his works; those that point, in turn, advances the artist in his own way. Simon keeps them wide-angle and the amplitude of previous cycles perspective but raises the point of view and for the first time away from the ground level and ground level to replicate their native landscape in an aerial view, almost straight down. From this elevation, new suggestions and an unprecedented geographical remoteness which give much importance to the atmosphere and the land-if you prefer: to air and land as the one with the water.
Although, as always, is this that determines the essence of painting and its meaning, this time through obsessive repetition of zigzag meander. With the emergence of this issue, Simon defined the first time in its pictorial map of the estuary a clear way, a clear profile, a fixed rate and repetitive, much as the line passing through uncertain territory, muddy and imprecise. It is water stilled, perhaps after a burst of destructive violence has changed the country and has finally solved a new bed. No piped water outside, not domesticated, but crafty and patient after the impetuosity of the flood. Water wise to finding itself a place in the terrain.
Water ways I (2010). Oil on canvas 180 x 180 cm.
Or, in pictorial terms: William Simon has put the water to draw , has allowed the nature of the report defines and painting takes shape, similar to what happens when you settle into the a meandering channel. In these tables, which is used to deal with the protein and the infinite, is faced with vertigo opposite to that which takes shape and definition. Not only water but also in geological features, plant imprints, irrigation and capillaries that resemble those of aerial views of the waterways in the river, and not being sought by methods direct, but with the same water fluid methods: washing, booking, theft, drag ... Also, in this case, smaller-format works, accumulating varnish set and thicken the landscape, pools and figurative painting itself by itself density of the lacquer the appearance of a stagnant liquid.
The majority of the mirrors (2010). Oil on canvas, 50 x 61 cm.
And all this in parallel, always, to his own biography, the way that will simultaneously accommodate their daily lives, in the form of painting, the experience of the territory of his beloved river, as it shows on the go and come daily Selorio his workshop, at the height of the small bridge where the Enciena-visible one of their favorite water-ways or on the verge of Biscay, in the endless view from the sands of Rodiles: places which inhabits William Simon their water whose connection with beautifully describes life in the title of one of his recent works: Where I dwell.
(Text for the exhibition The paths of water, of William Simon, Gema in Llamazares).
