“It’s completely something else,” Simão remarks.

In this new body of work, Marina Perez Simão explores monotype for the first time in her practice, a printmaking technique defined by its immediacy and unrepeatable nature, infused with a sense of curiosity, courage, and quiet intensity. These pieces, developed in close collaboration with master printmaker Michael Woolworth in Paris, embody a rare convergence of spontaneity and structure, intuition, and material constraint. The exhibition “Echoes” will be presented at both 14 and 15 rue du Dragon in the heart of Saint-Germain, Paris.

Monotype is a medium that rewards risk. The image is painted directly onto a smooth Plexiglas surface using specially prepared ink. Once complete, it is pressed onto paper—transferred only once, and never replicated. There are no revisions and no layering. Each piece is a singular event, a held breath made visible. For Simão, whose practice has consistently embraced the fluidity of gesture, the gradual unfolding of colour, and the pursuit of internal rhythm, monotype offers both a challenge and a sense of harmony.

Accustomed to the solitude of her São Paulo studio, Simão found the communal nature of the print studio to be a new form of intimacy—one that demanded trust, adaptability, and precision. Her painter’s logic carried over in unexpected ways: working with only five base colours (red, yellow, blue, black, and white), she mixed everything by hand, drawing on her deep chromatic knowledge to create nuance from limitation. She also introduced painterly techniques into the print process—using solvents to create washes, adapting watercolor gestures to ink, and building compositions that hover between intention and discovery.

There is a quest at the core of these works—not for answers, but for the right frequency. The compositions echo the classic dimensions of a lithographic stone, suggesting internal landscapes. Each monotype holds the intensity of a single moment—one gesture, one breath—where colour, intuition, and movement coalesce. Boats drift into moons. Horizons dissolve. The boundaries between sky, water, and body begin to blur—each form quietly transforming into another without resistance.

Far from mere studies or fragments, these monotypes are fully realised worlds. Unrepeatable moments of synthesis between form, emotion, and material. They carry the weight of presence, yet feel ephemeral—like weather, like scent, like memory. Some pieces began with the trace of a previous image—a ghostly imprint lingering on the plate, transformed into a fresh starting point. Others emerged directly from the brush, unplanned and immediate. In every instance, the pressure of the press flattens the ink into a smooth surface, occasionally producing unexpected textures and a softness that verges on photographic. Still, what remains constant is Simão’s voice: her musical sense of composition, her distinct colour theory, and her dedication to letting the unknown emerge.

This new series brings viewers closer to the core of Simão’s practice: a sustained attention to sensation, a belief in intuition as method, and a desire to suspend time within an image. What the monotype offers her is not a departure from painting, but an alternate route—a way to approach the same questions with different tools, different timing, and different forms of risk.

If her paintings often unfold like cosmologies across multiple surfaces, the monotypes are self-contained atmospheres. They do not explain; they invite. They ask the viewer to look not just at, but through—to notice how pigment behaves, how energy moves through a form even after the brush has lifted. In that space, Simão brings us closer to something at once intimate and expansive: a world formed in pressure and pigment, a world that can only exist once.

The monotypes exhibited at Cahiers d’Art echo the artist’s lifelong interest in subtle shifts, atmospheric states, and the deep frequencies of colour. In their immediacy, they reveal how much can be held in a single impression.

Alongside the monotypes, Simão created her first series of lithographs—four distinct compositions, each printed in an edition of twelve—marking her inaugural exploration of the medium. Developed especially for this exhibition and printed in Paris, these works build on the language of the monotypes while introducing new dimensions and technical considerations. Their launch  at Cahiers d’Art signals an expansion  of the artist’s practice  to printmaking and the beginning of a new chapter—guided by the same spirit of openness, inquiry, and formal sensitivity that defines her oeuvre.