Stux Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of an exhibition of paintings by Harvey Low Simons on Thursday, July 23, 2009. This is Boston-based Simons’ second one-person show in New York City with Stux.

The title of the exhibition comes from a poem by Arthur Rimbaud, capturing the oscillation between the visceral and the aesthetic that propels Simons’ paintings. Using a broad-ranging palette of colors, the initially expansive mood of these works darkens as they explore a surprisingly deep well of themes that embrace the mystical and the legendary. Recognizable fragments of the human form—a glimpse of a face here, the span of a muscled arm there—are confounded by shifting fields of abstract form, decomposing into clouds of color, merging with forms of animals that themselves ultimately give way to uncertain landscapes that are ultimately as macabre as they are beautiful. The painterly play of signification found in Cecily Brown’s work here is given a sharp Symbolist/Surrealist twist, historically reminiscent at times of the visionary feel of Odilon Redon. Taking as its subject the fundamental relationships between representation and the real, between thought and action, Simons plumbs a boundless, visceral, dreamy yet wicked world that makes manifest the surprising violence of the virtual, through its incarnation in the very materiality of painting itself.

Harvey Low Simons has a long-standing relationship with Stux Gallery, first exhibiting with it in 1983. Simons has exhibited in numerous galleries and museums such as Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Meredith Long Gallery, Houston, TX; DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA; and Brockton Art Museum, Brockton, MA. Simons currently lives and works in Newtonville, near Boston, Massachusetts.