GUILLERMO SIM?N Geografías del Mar Geografías del Mar GUILLERMO SIM?N 9594
GUILLERMO SIMÓN, THE ARTIST OF VOLCANIC SEASCAPES
There are so many ways to look at the sea, so many ways as the faces of reality, or even fantasy. Julio Llamazares states this and
he describes it in his work*: it depends on the person and on what he or she might be looking for. If we move this look from the
Porma dam - the narrative argument of the novelist born in León - to the Cantabrian Sea, hints and differences when observing
can be infinite. An ocean - superficial or underwater - is different from a river – quiet or streaming – or a lake – static and myste-
rious – or the rain – misty or heavy - , and differences are also marked by the observer, who may be a fisherman, a surfer, a walker,
a biologist… or an artist like Guillermo Simón, whose look becomes overseas and amphibious on the skyline of Rodiles.
Conquerors, pirates, adventurers, sportsmen, sailors, writers, artists…so many people facing the sea with different intentions and
results. History is full of examples and testimonies which are not relevant now, but they help to build the biography and iconogra-
phy of Guillermo Simón, the painter of salt water, as opposed to others who prefer the fresh one.
His grandfather, also called Guillermo Simón, nicely recreated the landscape of Villaviciosa, their territory, including the estuary
but never going farther than the channel. A contemporary college, Humberto Alonso, master of aquarelle, has ennobled the es-
tuary raising it to the level of Genre.
Guillermo Simón is far from being monothematic, but the sea is his gold mine, his muse, and he paints it with formal and chro-
matic variations, though always with the same look of inquiry and discovery. We find in all his works more dramatic tension than
romanticism, and more effort to perform than to describe.
It is clear that Guillermo Simón does not paint what he sees or even what he imagines with a narrative desire. The origin of his
pictorial tales, both present and past, is in his experiences, memories or personal looks, free from teachers, tendencies or schools.
He does not try to explain his nightmares or dreams – in an unconscious, spontaneous and simple act of auto-psychoanalysis;
he wants to express his feelings when facing nature, in its purest and wildest state, through a dialog without answer, a mixture of
confidence and confession, which means that there is no lightness or improvisation. On the contrary, everything is the result of a
reflexive and critic thought: the result of meditation.
Obviously, 2015 is the beginning of a new period because Guillermo Simón has moved from his past references to the more visible
look of the sea, made with the violence and harmony of swell, confronted currents, stormy winds and sea spray almost gaseous and
volcanic, producing incredible and surprising effects that lead on to expressionism and abstraction.
Clearly enough his look does not search for calmed seas or even slight swells. He focuses on other states of the sea, less predictable
and pleasant: rough, heavy, magnificent… erupting seas.
*Distintas formas de mirar el agua. Ed. Alfaguara. 2015
This is the amazing and amazed world that his painting describes, a painting made with effort and calm in his cloistered study of
Muslera (Tornón, Villaviciosa), close to the estuary in a bucolic setting of fields and small woods where El Gaitero, settled very
near, provides in an act of symbolic and pagan celebration another “spray”: its worldwide known cider.
Taking active part of this valuable patrimony, voluntarily cloistered in the thick walls of an old stable, free of ideas and acts, slave to
his memory and all visions and emotions kept on it, Guillermo Simón lives to paint and paints to live… so cliché, so franciscan like.
Evaristo Arce