Flamma
Simon Gouverneur
SIMON GOUVERNEUR, 1989. TEMPERA ON CANVAS.
Simon Grouveneur’s paintings are ciphers. Dense labyrinths of mythological symbolism, they are heavily encoded visual matrices of numbers, patterns, colors, and icons. Throughout his life he obsessively examined structures of philosophy, linguistics and mysticism and built a personal language and grammar of symbols, using his paintings to seek a truth and express complex ideas in aesthetic and balanced beauty. As obsessive as he was in his search for knowledge, he was more so in the process of creating the works. He created his paints by hand and spent months on each small canvas, working with an exacting and rigorous precision that left nothing to chance and no drop out of place. “Art is not to please or entertain”, he said, “art is to tell truth, not because artists are the only truth tellers but because art is the rite (sic) media to tell truth.”