Maxime Simon

Maxime Simon’s practice explores the intersections of history, imagination, and memory. Working across painting, illustration, and installation, he draws on forgotten stories, enduring archetypes, and the vestiges of civilisations partially erased by time. His compositions bring together figures and symbols from a collective imagination, at once ancient and invented, unfolding in fragmented scenes that hover between dream and memory.

 

Simon conceives each work as a layered surface. Through processes of accumulation and erasure, his images emerge like living ruins. This approach gives rise to a sense of a fictional past, shaped as much by imagination as by memory.

 

His practice combines traditional techniques, including tempera, ink, and natural pigments, with contemporary concerns such as the ecology of the senses, the survival of visual languages, and decentered narratives. 

 

Working in series and cycles, Simon allows for repetition, deviation, and transformation. Each work retains traces of earlier stages, forming a palimpsest in which meaning is continuously reconfigured. By drawing on myth and the unconscious, he seeks not to illustrate but to create spaces of projection and reflection.