Simona Snider
Color, Energy, Harmony, Balance
The energy radiated by the spectrum of visible light and the wavelengths of colors we perceive in shifting ways gives rhythm and allure to Simona Snider’s artistic and personal exploration. She unfolds the dynamic evolution of chromatic ribbons in lyrical space, capturing their potential and our perceptions, releasing the energy that drives instincts and triggers emotions. In harmony with the wonder and mystery that the natural optical effect of the rainbow continues to have on moods, health, ancient religions, and modern cultures—despite its atmospheric origins being well-explained by science—Snider’s work resonates.
The fluid and immediate gestures that characterize each variation of Simona Snider’s painting practice vibrate with the frequency of light trails in Venetian alleys, the winter nature in Engadine, the endangered Morteratsch Glacier, and the skies over Rome. She abstracts the sky, landscapes, and sea waves, along with the colors and sinuous movements of certain leaves, plankton, and jellyfish illuminating the depths. In the truest synthesis of perception, she delves into the instincts and complexity of organic, changeable visions—a visionary grammar that envelops her before reasoning, elaborating the metamorphosis of form and its potential. This fluidity unites all elements, from vegetation to humans and minerals, preserving the primal, fantastic visions faithful to the profound manifestations of nature, where real color and light interact with matter, creating new chromatic harmonies.
Building on the role color plays in the natural world and image society, with its ability to narrate, organize, seduce, enhance, distinguish, reveal, and conceal information, the artist taps into the incredible ability of vision to perceive color in countless ways, opening up new possibilities for exploration and discovery. These are new spaces of freedom and balance. By reconnecting our gaze to the vastness of nature on a spiritual level, she also reconfigures our potential role within the ecosystem and the way we construct, alter, and dissolve collective memory, reflecting on its value and meaning in the present.
The pursuit of chromatic harmony, brought to life with acrylic on paper, canvas, and on various surfaces, with hypnotic oscillations, animates the synthesis of organic forms and emotional landscapes, as well as traces, sensations, and suggestions. These are traces of a time dissolved by the unexpected dialogue with existence’s complexity and emotional fabric. Abstraction, chosen as a language to transcend form and traverse the dimension of emotions, frees the essential from the superfluous, always preserving the energy of color, the mystique of nature, and the metaphysics of vision. She explores our relationship with both the natural and supernatural, alongside the need to reconnect with spiritual and energetic resources overlooked in the fast-paced contemporary world. Her work urges the importance of restoring inner balance, with spiritual harmony infused with chromatic energy, to reconnect with the nature of oneself and the world.
Simona Snider’s ever-evolving artistic language embodies an urgency to infuse reason with feeling and the material aspects of life with spirituality. It becomes both a lifestyle and an artistic approach, with her passion for painting blossoming like a first love, cultivated through the exploration of techniques, movements, and theories, without ever losing sight of the emotional sphere and her poetic voice. Working with the energy and perception of color that guided an art shaman and the father of abstraction like Wassily Kandinsky, or the ability to synthesize and search for the sacred like Paul Cézanne, she pursues the sacred that even religion cannot contain, capable of regenerating reason. It is the sacred that vibrates at the encounter with the unknown dimensions of oneself and the world. To infuse her artistic experience with strong spiritual values and touch the deepest states of mind, Simona Snider follows the rhythm of form and color composition and combination. This is the necessary movement for the inner balance of mind, body, and spirit, like every tightrope walker of the contemporary world. Drawing on theories about color perception and the visual illusion that strikes the eye with the brain’s cooperation, she works on the decomposition of the color spectrum of light and its complex optical or chromatic dispersion, determined by different refraction angles. Amplifying its effects and suggestions, she starts from the insight exemplified by Isaac Newton as early as the mid-17th century, with the triangular prism experiment used to decompose and recompose the colors making up white light. As iconic as the effect simulated for fifty years on the musical vibrations of Pink Floyd, from the cover of the album The Dark Side of the Moon (March 1, 1973).
Using color vibrations like musical ones, Simona Snider enhances harmony and beauty in complexity, along with variations determined by sensations and mixing, the brightness of complementarity, and the balance of symmetry between forces. The almost hypnotic motion of her works expresses the unsaid to reveal it, as poets and philosophers do, returning attention to color perception that we take for granted, like the interaction with matter that strikes and the energetic resources it exerts on inner balance. Her work invites reflection on the power and significance that chromatic and spiritual harmonies can have on the accelerated rhythm of visually and colorfully conveyed information and the liquid flow of contemporaneity.
Biography
Simona Snider (b. 1976) continues her artistic exploration in her studio in Bergamo’s Città Alta. Her formative experience is marked by a passion for painting, from art high school to apprenticeships with various masters. Her temperament and various specialized courses contribute to expanding her research horizon, ranging from gilding techniques and baroque ornamental decoration to photography. Her study of color perception and the theories of Newton, Chevreul, Itten, and Kueppers does the rest. Drawing and oil painting techniques, attentive to Symbolist connotation, ultimately embrace abstraction, along with the pursuit of chromatic harmonies connected to spiritual energies, the inner harmony touched by the unending work of vision. Her work, exhibited in Italy and abroad since 1996, has recently featured at the Affordable Art Fair Milan with the Bianchi/Zardin gallery in 2020; the Italian Vanity Art Exhibition at the International Studio of Art & Galleries in Dubai and Imago Ars in Venice in 2021; the Galleria I Leone in Rome, with the contemporary art exhibition “Non servono parole” and the Pro Biennale in Venice in 2022; and the “Donne in Luce” event in the historic Pio Sodalizio dei Piceni complex in Rome in March 2023, and in June at the 10th Monte Carlo International Art Biennale. Following are “Perscrutazioni” in Verbania, Galleria Spazio BIG Verbania, in December 2023, and at the same gallery, the solo exhibition “Percorsi” in January 2024. In the same month, she will participate in the Bergamo Fair and in February 2024 at “Tele colori e lago” organized by Lievi Eventi, Lago di Lecco. At the end of April, she will take part in “Apiario d’autore,” Ales-Oristano. In May, she participated in the exhibition “Arte senza tempo” at Spazio Big Santa Marta in Milan.
Simona Snider
Art Studio, Bergamo Città Alta
E-mail: info@simonasnider.com
Sito Web: www.simonasnider.com
Instagram: @_snider_artist
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