Lyon, Frankreich

We don’t really know why we produce images. Are we trying to capture an emotion, the passing of time, an ephemeral inner vision ? Dom Simon delivers a personal universe that feeds off contradictory and complementary references. This is undoubtedly why his work is always on the edge between two worlds: between classicism and modernity, photography and painting, smooth and scarred surfaces, movement and immobility, between reality and dream. Everything in Dom Simon’s work seems to be the result of a mysterious union between all these opposites. Some will see similarities with his many sources of inspiration: Sarah Moon, Saul Leiter, Gerhard Richter or Edward Hopper. Others will find bridges with the pop culture, the cinema of Wim Wenders and Stanley Kubrick or Soulages quest for light.

Dom Simon, who has been trained in the applied arts where he was able to explore all sorts of techniques, is the result of a sum of opposites. He skillfully combines vertical lines of blue, red, green or black ballpoints, adding subtle shades of coloured pencils as an upper or under layer. His favourite medium is paper. He strokes it with the tip of his pens and pencils or mistreats it with sandpaper, cutters or other tools that allow him to go and find the light at the core of the matter.
Dom Simon constantly questions his practice, his choices, his formats, each of his images leads him towards other images or other challenges, where his imagination wanders.

Morning stories is the last series of visuals proposed by Dom Simon. Through this succession of tryptics, we find the artist’s own universe : images halfway between pictorial classicism and references to the world of photography and cinema. The influences are mixed and recomposed, the cinema of Wim Wenders joins that of Tarantino, the painting of Edward Hopper is honored as well as the photographic blurs of Heinrich Kühn. Morning stories is also a reflection on narration. We are faced with clues that orient us without locking us in. What happens outside the frame is as important as what happens inside. The spectator is summoned to the role of an actor. Everything participates in the narrative, including our state of mind. Mirror of our unconscious, these triptychs absorb us, fascinate us, and plunge us into the deepest of intimate scenarios.