“One can even go so far as to say that in this dizzying race the images appear like the only guideposts of the mind.”

A. Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924

For the ninth edition of Rome Art Week, the Art Sharing space is transformed into a dreamlike place, populated by the visions and apparitions of Lucia Simone's great works.

The artist is a painter who came to the technique of collage and digital painting following a very significant personal experience: the experience of chronic headache with aura forced her away from the palette for long periods, but also projected her into a singular and fantastic introspective world.

Between dream and vision, the artist has been on a journey of self-knowledge and acceptance of pain for years, which she explains and makes universal through visual expression: in the moments

that precede the headache she goes through extrasensory experiences that make she fly far from herself.

Her curiosity and fundamental positivity lead her to travel through perceptual alterations, exploring surreal paradises, sometimes enchanting, sometimes disturbing, always changing and fascinating.

Immersed in a sort of pictorial pareidolia, Lucia Simone works on her visions through visual and even olfactory assonances: in a state that we could define as hallucinatory, the smell of a meadow, of the undergrowth, of the wind, of the trees, of the people, expands into shapes and colours and becomes an image. As in Baudelaire's aesthetic manifesto, synaesthetic correspondences take Lucia Simone by the hand, accompanying her into the depths of her mind.

The other paradises of his work are therefore a tool of communication towards the outside world: much more than an escape, they are a reasoning on the conscience and the unconscious, made tangible through the aesthetic form, generously offered to the public gaze. But they are also a reflection on the precariousness of human existence and the impact that man has on his environment.

A slow and meticulous work that is part of the Post-Internet Art movement that claims the right to draw on the wealth of visual stimuli of the web to create ever-new stories and images.

Starting from digitally reworked photographic collages and pictorial interventions, Lucia Simone reconstructs the visions, sign after sign, staging the imaginative archetype of the vision of Eden.

His gardens are mysterious, suspended, teeming with signs and magic, at times dark and humid like a forest from which we do not know – and do not want – to retreat.

A century ago André Breton published the Manifesto of Surrealism, a poison and a spell that have entered our skin and that we do not want to free ourselves from: Lucia Simone, a hundred years later, puts on stage that truth of presumed madness, the only possible sincerity of the human spirit.

Lucia Simone – Bio

Born in 1986, she lives and works in Rome.

Graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, she has a background in both engraving and painting and digital graphics. His research took a clearer direction starting from 2018, when he began to collect public recognition by exhibiting, among other places, at Palazzo Montecitorio in Rome and Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.

Her works travel the world: in 2023 she was selected as a finalist for the Luigi Candiani prize, she exhibited as a finalist for the Arte Laguna Prize at the Arsenale in Venice and one of her works was selected for a progress advertisement with a display on a giant screen in New York, Los Angeles and Amsterdam.

During the first week of January 2024 Exibart Prize advertised her work on the screens of Grandi Stazioni Italiane.