Excerpt from the Press Release

Philipp Simon considers the balance between reality and fiction and how each new piece of information can reshape the narrative. Simon explores consciousness and the construction of identity, incorporating materials such as collage and frottage to make visible the conditions of production. Drawings like IR 4.1 AoS, 2024 capture the process of extracting informal references and leaving behind a sphere captured in motion, alluding to literal and mechanical scales. Connections are reduced to such atomized detail that the data becomes fiction. It’s a scale-free view, making it impossible to know if one is looking at something up close or at a distance. 

There are strange attractors in the drawings. And there is background noise, which is the broader context of the emerging situation - static. An attractor is a set to which all neighboring trajectories converge, and a strange attractor exhibits a sensitive dependence on the initial conditions—forces that pull particles that emanate or grow into each other. A function of trying to make sense of the world - visualization of information is comforting. A tangible pre-state coming to fruition, nodding to the limitations of perception. Data, information, vector points on a grid, representation. Producing an image from a situation that no longer exists is an extraction and moment of process.

Parable, 2025 consists of hand-crafted, commissioned, and found objects: a small carpet, the split of a tree trunk wrapped in textiles, old clothes, plastic trash—sediments of waste and time—and a pressboard bent from the rain, finely sanded and then veneered. Parables are allegorical narratives used to convey a moral lesson. In mathematics, a “curve parable” refers to a parabola, a plane curve that is mirror-symmetrical and bends as a U-shape. 

— Claire Sammut