There is a moment in Dom Simon’s images when the eye believes it has understood — and then something slips away.
A figure seems to have been photographed. A face appears caught in a mysterious instant. A light cuts across a body with the precision of a cinematic frame. At first, everything conspires to give us the impression of a familiar image: a photograph, a film still, perhaps the memory of a painting. Then the material intervenes. The paper, worked, scratched, sanded, traversed by ink and pencil, quietly reminds us that what we are looking at has not been captured, but constructed. The image was already there, and yet it is still in the process of being made.
It is within this gap that much of the power of Dom Simon’s work resides: between the image and its memory, between what we recognize and what we cannot name.
His visual language has been shaped through an encounter with several histories of the image. The paintings of Francis Bacon and Gerhard Richter, the photography of Saul Leiter, the silent spaces of Edward Hopper, the cinema of Stanley Kubrick, Wim Wenders, and Wong Kar-wai all constitute points of resonance. Yet their images are not quoted as references to be identified. Rather, they seem to have been absorbed, digested, and transformed into something else. A posture, a light, a fragment of scenery, a particular way of framing become elements of a new visual language.
This way of working with pre-existing images says something about our time. We live surrounded by images, within a visual grammar that has become almost universal: some images belong to us, while others have been seen a thousand times without our knowing where or when. Dom Simon works precisely within this ambiguous territory. He brings forth images that seem familiar without returning us to their source. Recognition becomes a sensation rather than a certainty.
It is here that Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows offers a particular resonance. Not as a framework through which to interpret these works, but as a way of approaching them. Tanizaki reminds us that light does not always equate with revelation, and that absolute clarity can also impoverish the gaze. There is a beauty in dimness, patina, and withdrawal; a beauty that reveals itself only to those willing to look for a little longer.
Dom Simon seems to make this slowness a condition of the image. His drawings do not necessarily seek to show everything. They work with restraint, erasure, density, and vibration. The paper becomes almost like skin: we perceive its irregularities, abrasions, and traces. Light is no longer merely what illuminates the subject; it becomes a material circulating within the drawing itself. It emerges from a darkened surface, as though the image were born as much from what has been removed as from what has been added.
The woman carrying a candle who moves through this imaginary world becomes an essential figure. She moves forward without ever having a complete view. Her light is fragile, mobile, subjective. She does not possess the space she illuminates. She discovers it in fragments.
Perhaps this is also what Dom Simon asks of the viewer: to relinquish, for a moment, the desire to identify everything. To accept that an image can remain partially inaccessible. That doubt is not a failure of perception, but a more attentive way of looking — a way of resisting the imperative to expose everything, illuminate everything, simplify everything.
In a world saturated with images that are immediately available, his work reintroduces a sense of distance. It is not a matter of rejecting light, but of reclaiming shadow as a form of truth; of reminding us that an image does not need to be entirely visible in order to be present, and that it can retain a measure of silence without losing its force.
His drawings thus become the site of a paradoxical apparition: the closer they seem to come to the immediacy of a snapshot, the more they reveal the fragility of the way we see. What we thought we recognized shifts. What we believed to be fixed begins to vibrate again.
