Galerie Enrico Navarra

in which Raquel Welch accompanies Arthur Kennedyon a trip through the brain of an injured scientist in orderto remove a blood clot.Simonds, too, embarks on fantastic voyages. The diminutivethat applies to the invisible inhabitants of his citiesand settlements, the Little People, thus takes on an ambiguousquality. It not only indicates the impossibility ofphysically entering his imaginary land, the contrast inscale between viewer and image brings out a distancein terms of time as well. The focal point of the experienceof Simonds' art lies in an inaccessible, vanished erabefore the beginning of time. The resulting confrontationof different world views engenders a mood in whichvisionary or Romantic cosmogonies suggest themselves.We know hardly anything concrete about the imaginarypeople who live in Simonds' miniature Dwellings. Theexplanations he provides leave a lot to the imagination.For instance: "Each Dwelling is a different scene fromthe Little People's lives. They have particular beliefswhich form, or inform, that space. Some are religiousplaces; some are reinhabited ruins; some are just housesand settlements. " The most precise hints Simonds givesrefer to the fact that the Little People fall into threecategories, "those who live in a line, those who buildin a circle, and those who construct spirals. " Here, theirhaving lived is attested to by no more than certainpreferences for shapes or ornaments.So our knowledge about the abandoned DwellingsSimonds brings to the living city remains indeterminate.Nor does he himself provide an interpretation. Or rather,he provides rather coy little descriptions of the inhabitants,as when he tells Abadie that "an astonishinglyreal joy prevails in the quasi-infantile world of the LittlePeople. It is a peaceful world without constraint, and almostwithout thought." Presumably Simonds consciouslyintends to keep interpretations of his work open-ended,for his Dwellings are endlessly evocative. They send usoff on ethnographical expeditions, into Indian pueblosor ancient, ruined centers of civilization. They provokespeculation about strange, lost customs, and aboutall of the possible worlds ever envisioned by scientistsand poets in an attempt to break out of their mundanesurroundings.To take only one example, from our own period: HenriMichaux's Voyage en Grande Garabagne (1936)./n thistravel report the author spirits us into imaginary lands.He describes the odd customs and habits of a peoplecalled the Emanglons, who live in a state of continualpanic. Then he visits the Orbus, a slow and thoughtfultribe by comparison to the nervous Hivinizikis, who liveonly for the moment. But as in all books of this type,not only character traits but outlandish customs play akey role. In Michaux's lei, Poddema (1946), we read ofpeople who are raised in pots-legless slaves whosetorsos are immersed in a nutritive solution. They requireno legs because they do their work with their arms alone.In sum, it is not only the toy/ike character of Simonds'structures that exerts an attraction on the viewer. Eventhough their miniaturization calls the myths and preoccupationsof childhood to mind, the closest parallels areto be found in art history nonetheless. One of the mostobvious is that between the architectural forms Simondsrepeatedly employs and the anamorphoses of Mannerism-theBuilding of the Tower of Babel, the paintingsof Arcimboldo, Joos de Momper, or Hendrick van CleveIll, Maerten van Heemskerck's Depiction of the SevenWonders of the World, or the suffocating prisons ofPiranesi. Or one thinks of A!tdorfer's Alexanderschlacht,from which the figures seem to have been suddenlysucked up into a vacuum.Still, the mood of Simonds' work comes closest to definitionwhen it is compared to a world of imagery thatplays with the baffling-Romanticism and Surrealismprovide the real parameters. Take the fascination felt bythe Surrealists in face of the famous, visionary imagewith which Horace Walpole introduces his Castle ofOtranto: a gigantic, feathered helmet that falls out of thesky into the castle courtyard. Or Kafka 's "Building theChinese Wall", and the endless road the emperor's messengerhas to take before he reaches the reader. Otherparallels are found in Borges (The Library of Babylon) or inBeckett (Le Depeupleur). In every case, we are confrontedwith a perfect system that ends in the terror of the labyrinth.In these imaginative worlds, the bird's-eye-viewdominates, a viewpoint born of desperation which leavesno room for the individual.These are only a few of the many possible associationsto which Simonds' work gives rise. They indicate thateach individual viewer is challenged to find his or her. y,, 2001, 152,5 x 89 x 28 em, argile et platre I60 x 35 x 11 inches, clay and plaster19