Ross Simonini at suns.works

Artist: Ross Simonini

Exhibition title: PAN

Venue: suns.works, Zurich, Switzerland

Date: September 9 – November 10, 2023

suns.works is pleased to present PAN, the first solo exhibition in Switzerland by Ross Simonini, an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Los Angeles, USA. The exhibition includes new paintings and drawings, as well as a performance. The new moon (September 14th) will also mark the release of a new musical composition, The Theme of Good Will, and new paintings will be added to the show.

Simonini works across a wide range of media as a painter, writer, composer, and dialogist, and is deeply influenced by synergies between different fields of human expression – often involving his whole body to create visual art. In using all four limbs when working, the artist’s “hand” is both obscured and totalized.

All of Simonini’s marks come from a phrase, repeated to produce the many lines and fields in his work. Every mark is a letter. The phrase may be repeated thousands of times in a single painting. “Repetition is an effective technique,” Simonini says. “It’s good for learning, training, and praying. Making art is a useful way to engage with the learning-training-praying qualities of repetition. When I’m writing music, I listen to a composition hundreds of times over months, and then might perform it for many more years. As I do this, I’m putting those words and sounds into my body over and over and over again. (So what, exactly, am I putting in? I use music as an example because it’s so physical in the way it affects us, but you can apply the same thing to painting. If I work on a large, red painting for 3 months, staring deeply into it, using the same kinds of short motions, what am I programming my body to do?”

With every repetition, operated by hands and toes, Simonini is producing imagery that allows space for a hidden realm to appear: Faces, sounds, scribbles all merge into what the artist considers beings — tricksters and gods, embodying secret meaning, like Pan, the all-being of ancient mythology whose true presence is too expansive for the human mind to conceive. Simonini’s paintings evoke a blend of softness and delicacy, conveying captivating expressions through an atmosphere of figuration and endless pan-narratives that refuse to be reduced.

For the show at suns.works these many expressions of PAN are exhibited as a constellation, in a 12 floor high rise, echoing against a panoramic view.

Ross Simonini, PAN, 2023, exhibition view, suns.works, Zurich

Ross Simonini, PAN III, 2023, milk paint & egg tempera on canvas, framed, 147 x 183 cm

Ross Simonini, PAN IV, 2023, milk paint & egg tempera on canvas, framed, 66 x 162 cm

Ross Simonini, PAN II, 2023, milk paint, egg tempera on canvas, framed, 75 x 175cm

Ross Simonini, PAN I, 2023, milk paint, egg tempera on canvas, framed, 152 x 101 cm

Ross Simonini, The Mores, 2023, milk paint on canvas, framed, 35 x 29 cm

Ross Simonini, The Sips, 2023, milk paint on canvas, framed 32 x 36 cm

Ross Simonini, Magus in Yellow, 2021-2022, watercolor and ink on paper, framed, 28 x 43 cm

Ross Simonini, Transmission in Yellow, 2021-2022, watercolor and ink on paper, framed, 28 x 43 cm

Ross Simonini, Pocket in Yellow, 2021-2022, ink and collaged paper on paper, framed 28 x 43 cm

Ross Simonini, Ceremony in Yellow, 2021-2022 watercolor on paper, framed, 28 x 43 cm

Ross Simonini, Warmth in Yellow, 2021-2022, watercolor and ink on paper, framed, 28 x 43 cm

Ross Simonini, Pleasure in Yellow, 2021-2022, watercolor on paper, framed, 28 x 43 cm

Ross Simonini, Sage in Yellow, 2021-2022, pencil and collaged paper on paper, framed 28 x 43 cm

Ross Simonini, Arrival in Yellow, 2021-2022, mixed media on paper, framed, 28 x 43 cm

Ross Simonini, PAN, 2023, performance, suns.works, Zurich