Simone Boon is a Dutch artist who finds effortless accord with the fundamentals of art. Her mastery of line, form, space, value and colour is expressed in her most recent exhibition of figurative and abstract photography. Elusive Phenomenology is imbued with Simone’s comprehensively perceptive articulation of patterns of movement and their intrinsic link to the passage of time.
Born in Indonesia and raised amongst a melting-pot of influences from Borneo, the Netherlands, Venezuela, Belgium, Malaysia, Austria and Hong Kong, Simone’s life has been defined by its nomadic quality. Her affinity for observing and documenting the overt and covert nuances of cultures, religion, race and creed has culminated in art of an ambitious complexity tempered by pure aesthetic beauty. Experiencing her photographs is a dive through a surface of orchestrated composition and spectral colours, continuing on through myriad planes where time, space and place begin to coalesce finally shrugging off preconceived linear definitions to instead, exist in a state of elegant flux.
Elusive Phenomenology explores this transitory essence. The in-between moments that unify the before and after. For Simone, this quality is particularly resonant in the years a young woman stands on the precipice of young adulthood. Her work amplifies and attempts to bring clarity to the visual qualities that shroud a woman at various times of their life. Though photography is used to document and give visual presence, Simone’s abstract artworks are derived from a highly produced process of technical and dramatic aptitude.
Models are cloaked, veiled and draped in layers of fabric of different weights and opacity that act as pulse points connecting moments which map shapes and seem to suspend time. Tendrils of movement are captured by photographing with slow shutter speeds, the smallest aperture, and low natural light. The movements of the body are rendered in a single image that resurrects and reveres the phenomenological weight of each transition with forms, often not visible to the naked eye. Elusive Phenomenology is a powerful and ephemeral study of female identity that transcends cultures and heralds the mysteries embedded within the evolution of the feminine psyche. One that is infinitely complex, profoundly elusive, yet entirely beguiling.
Written by Tiffany Jade.
