Isabel Simões’s paintings explore shifting sites where a threshold is identified, translated and made tangible. The artist navigates around a given space and has demonstrated a particular awareness and sensitivity in her painting to overlaps, folds, residue, traces, openings, to transient moments where interior and exterior space meet, where past and present convene, to sites where intimacy and publicness touch, where surfaces meld, and to situations where the shifting, unstable boundary between the painting and wall is rehearsed. This superimposition of planes translates into a subjective topology, a pictorial space that generates a lived and shared space-time experience. Simões’s installation-like painting transforms the painting-object into a meaningful support when observed by the viewer, who is implied through a specific position. Her works also suggest the existence of another side, a beyond or alterity. In the artist-viewer duality, the position in front of a painting is an exchangeable one – a place occupied by both subjects at different times. Simões attempts to rehearse this permutation. (Nancy Dantas)