David Castillo presents Xaviera Simmons: Ocular (the principle of pleasure), a solo exhibition of paintings and photographic works. Ocular is the artist’s eighth solo exhibition with the gallery.

Over a dozen paintings, a new body of work exhibited here for the first time anchor this exhibition accompanied by four small scale photographic works. The paintings extend Simmons’ ongoing use of materials, continued dialogue with the histories of art and artmaking itself.  For the artist, it is an immersion into the ecstatic romance with the medium. “Painting is as expansive as the painters that fall deeply in love with and wrestle with the mechanics and histories of painting, of engaging color, and building shape, and form, to let the language of painting fall endlessly onto itself,” she says.

Simmons, who has produced large scale text paintings, for more than a decade, began experimenting with abstract painting and color fields while in residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem in 2012. It is not merely that the paint brings her clarity, pleasure and endless contemplative moments, she adds, “I am deeply inspired by painting in all of its complexities and lose myself in a conceptual conversation with the history of art and the artists who work in this medium. At this juncture in my practice, painting feels the most deeply liberating.”

The paintings here are driven by the exhibition’s titular concept: the pleasure principle, desire, delight, and the ability to work mind to hand without many of the mechanical technical trappings of photography, performance and large scale sculpture; all of which Simmons has worked in throughout her career.

The paintings are buoyant. Rendered in bright jewel tones and deep earth hues, swaths of pink, purple, brown, seafoam green, and mustard yellow encircle and touch one other. The artist’s brushes, often hand constructed by the artist from a variety of materials including botanicals and natural materials, give the works a feathered and fuzzy texture, as if the paintings might be soft to the touch.  They begin to take on familiar forms, whether conjured by the viewer’s own natural pareidolia or by Simmons’ intentions. A moon rises over a purple mountain. A palm frond grazes the canvas. Here, a road. Or a map. Or an embrace. Muted pink. Moss green. Soft, oceanic blue. Contained by their size, they feel as sweeping as landscapes, a subject integral to the artist’s larger practice. “These paintings offer an invitation to renew, begin and then begin again,” Simmons reflects. “The work emerges not only from what has been inherited, but from what can be imagined, risked, and made wholly in the present.”

Xaviera Simmons’ body of work includes photography, performance, painting, video, sound, and sculpture, and Simmons often works cyclically through each medium to examine the myriad ways that art and social histories,  language, landscape, and portraiture construct and are influenced by one another. Simmons received her BFA from Bard College (2004) after spending two years on a walking pilgrimage retracing the Transatlantic slave trade with Buddhist monks. She completed the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in Studio Art (2005) while simultaneously completing a two-year actor-training conservatory with The Maggie Flanigan Studio. She has held teaching positions at Harvard University, Yale University, Columbia University and The School Of The Art Institute, Chicago and was awarded The Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters from Bard College in Summer 2020. Simmons’s work has been included in museum exhibitions at MoMA, NY, Guggenheim, NY, ICA Boston, SFMOMA, The Phillips Collection (D.C.), National Museum of Women in the Arts (D.C.), Barnes Foundation, Harvard University, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), The Jewish Museum, NY, Minneapolis Institute of Art, New Museum, among many others.  Her works are in major museum collections including The Museum of Modern Art, The Nasher Museum, The High Museum, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Studio Museum in Harlem, ICA Miami, The Bass Miami Beach, and dozens more.