Madeline Simm’s paintings evolve as a continual negotiation between structure and sensation, where measured geometries hold a pulse of intuition and colour, creating a tactile sensation. Her compositions, meticulously mapped before execution, reveal a sensibility attuned to rhythm and balance, recalling the mystical colour theories of Johannes Itten, who urged students to find their own chromatic affinities through contrast and polarity. Simm, too, embraces colour’s subjective charge, wielding it as both an organizing force and a conduit for emotional expression.
At the heart of this exhibition, Inflorescence, is a meditation on growth–the unfolding of thought through line and the bloom of an idea through hue and form. Her compositions, some revisited in variations, suggest a sequential approach, yet they resist repetition by introducing differences in colour, texture and form. Freehand lines, sometimes invoking floral motifs, act as organic counterpoints to the structure of her gridded arrangements. In this, Simm aligns herself with artists like Renée Levi, whose spontaneous, calligraphic gestures uncover form as they emerge, as well as with the legacies of Hilma af Klint and Georgia O’Keeffe, who used floral structures as scaffolds for self-expression and chromatic exploration.
Despite its engagement with the historical languages of abstraction –from Mondrian’s disciplined harmonies to Malevich’s spiritual geometries–Simm’s work remains firmly rooted in lived experience. Her colours are drawn from both theory and from the landscapes she moves through the interiors she inhabits, and the textiles she encounters. They are observed, remembered, transcribed into small pencil studies, tested in sketchbooks, and later transposed onto canvas, where hand-mixed pigments result in surfaces that oscillate between solid and textured, depth and reflectivity. In certain works, form and space merge in an energetic exchange of full and empty space, creating a shifting visual experience.
The grid, in Simm’s hand, is both playful and purposeful. It serves as a method of containment, however one that invites disruption. Her approach favours affectionate subversion over rigid adherence, acknowledging the grid’s historical weight, from modernist painting to architectural design, tempered by a lightness that retains a sense of fluidity and warmth. In these works, abstraction is about touch. There is a deep engagement with textures, luminosities, and fluctuating intensities. Simm’s paintings insist on joy as, an act of presence, a reminder that in the midst of uncertainty, the hand can still move, the eye can still wander, and colour can still vibrate with life.
