Soma places the figure under pressure. Against a culture of increasingly manipulated, filtered and generated bodies, Michael Simms’paintings return to the complexity of lived embodiment, distinguishing the lived body from the body as image. In Simms’s classical training we find a structure, a universal translation sitting in comfortable collective familiarity. Yet in using his own body as both subject and material, Simms searches for extreme perspectives and internalised viewpoints that condition familiar anatomy as intangibly legible. Adopting unconventional gazes through mirrors, video work, movement performance and somatic experimentation to look through and across the figure in shifting states, he paints consciousness as shaped by our felt relationships. As bodies fold back upon themselves, turning towards contortion, Simms interrogates ideals through which the body is disciplined, scrutinised and held to normative expectations as a broader critique of the gaze through a queer lens. Examining how external structures of looking are internalised and policed from within. Simms’ surfaces are cut, scraped, glazed, obscured and rebuilt; edges emerge and dissolve; with the accumulated surface retaining a history of action, as a body carries the marks of stretch, scar, age. 

Michael Simms is an interdisciplinary artist working across painting, drawing, photography and performance, based on Gadigal Country, Sydney. Exhibiting extensively across Australia, he has been a finalist in the Archibald, Darling Portrait, Doug Moran, Callen and SBS Portrait Prizes, among others. His practice has also been recognised through residencies at the New York Academy of Art, Broken Hill Art Exchange, Bundanon Artist in Residence Program and Gang Gang Residency Program. Represented by Eloise Cato Gallery, Sydney, and Flinders Lane Gallery, Melbourne, Simms’ work is held in major public and private collections nationally and internationally, including Maitland Regional Art Gallery, The Elliott Eyes Collection and the Accenture (YSC) Collection, Sydney. He holds a Bachelor of Arts and Behavior al Science from Flinders University and was formally trained in classical drawing and painting at the Julian Ashton Art School in Sydney

Soma | Michael Simms

Essay by Kate McAuley
 

In Michael Simms’ Soma, the artist offers us the body, but not as we know it. Folds of skin concertina across the canvas, while limbs bend at improbable angles, rendering the familiar into strange, undulating landscapes. And, while physiological linchpins - an ear, nipple, hand grasping flesh - anchor the figure within the frame, elsewhere forms slip towards abstraction. His large canvases offer a distortion, monumental and imposing in scale, these unguarded quiet moments are intimately tender, confidently gentle in their inner radiating glow.

Working in oil on linen, Simms’ builds surfaces to sand and scrape back, before starting the process all over again. Moving seamlessly between anatomical precision and intuitive mark making, allowing chance and emotion into a regime that had previously relied on control. Simms has spent much of his career drawing on his classical training at the Julian Ashton Art School, emphasising anatomical accuracy, careful observation and traditional proportion. Here, however, the artist has, in an almost mannerist tradition, begun questioning these ingrained ways of seeing, asking what happens when we stop looking at the body as an object only. The title of the exhibition, ‘Soma’, the ancient Greek word for body, extends this inquiry, inviting us to consider the body not simply as a physical form and challenge the premise of the body as fixed, knowable, through which questions of identity and consciousness emerge.

In the studio, Simms began exploring this concept by experimenting with intersecting mirrors and video recordings of himself, capturing unfamiliar gestures and perspectives that conventional life drawing overlooks. Simms also drew on his experience with somatic practice, an artform that uses movement and physical awareness to explore the relationship between the body, the mind and our emotional responses. The results are captivating and ultimately beautiful - while these unfamiliar perspectives may initially disorient us, the sensations they evoke are recognisable... We know what it feels like to be awkward in our own skin, and to be conscious of another's gaze.

In Soma the body is masculine, though stripped of its heroic armour. Simms embraces softness, awkwardness and vulnerability without sacrificing beauty. There is nothing idealised about these figures, nor is there any attempt to diminish them. Instead, he gives weight and significance to the parts of ourselves we might ordinarily overlook or try to conceal. The influence of feminist artists, such as Joan Semmel, Betty Tompkins and Jenny Saville, whose representations of the predominantly female body challenged traditional views and gazes of beauty, may have led Simms to blur the edges of the idealised male figure here into something less rigidly defined, more relatable and equally desirable. Through Simms’ queer lens, it’s evident that the body becomes a site where external scrutiny is internalised, and the cultural codes of masculinity are both reproduced and undone.
  
Within the works themselves, the figures seem to strain against the canvases. That sense of pressure continues into the gallery, where curation becomes an extension of the work. Contact rests on the floor, pressed into a corner, while Holding Pattern and Unposed are suspended and pressed between two walls, their forms momentarily confined by the architecture around them. As a result, we must move and negotiate our own space to view them, becoming more conscious of our own physical presence in the process, which reminds us of the extraordinary strangeness of having a body at all.

- Kate McAuley