“Salty Simon here, welcome to; Star Lab”
Accumulated tension - “The birth of a star”
The work begins with the body as a site of accumulation.
I am interested in the tensions produced through lived experience: desire and restraint, intimacy and loss, life and death, transformation, uncertainty, and the persistent condition of having to negotiate what cannot be controlled. Rather than attempting to resolve these tensions conceptually, I allow them to accumulate physically—as sensation, pressure, impulse, and energy within the body.
Movement becomes the method through which this accumulation is activated.
Through sensual and physically charged performance, I enter into a dialogue with the tension I am carrying. The body becomes both instrument and medium; movement is not predetermined choreography, but a process of listening, responding, resisting, and surrendering. The performance creates a space in which psychological and emotional states can become physical phenomena.
The painting emerges from this state of heightened physicality.
At the point of culmination, I transfer the accumulated energy directly onto the canvas through impact, gesture, and release. Black paint is struck and dispersed across the surface, producing a star-like form. The mark is not an image conceived in advance, but the material consequence of an embodied event. The star is therefore not something I paint so much as something that happens. It is the visible record of a moment in which accumulated tension crosses from the body into matter.
In this sense, the star functions as a point of condensation. It gathers the preceding movement, sensation, and psychological tension into a single physical event. At the same time, its radiating form suggests an expansion outward—the moment of release after accumulation. It holds contraction and expansion, containment and rupture, destruction and creation simultaneously.
The star also introduces a scale beyond the individual body. What begins as an intensely personal and corporeal experience opens onto something more universal: the forces of attraction and separation, birth and collapse, order and entropy. I am interested in the ambiguity of this image. It can be read as a cosmic body, an explosion, an impact, a wound, an origin, or simply the trace of a gesture. Its meaning is not fixed; it remains suspended between the intimate and the infinite.
The performance does not end with the canvas.
Paint is transferred onto my body and face, extending the pictorial surface from the canvas onto the performer. The body becomes another site of inscription—marked by the same material that has just been released onto the painting. Through photography, this altered state is preserved as part of the work. The resulting images are not documentation in a purely evidentiary sense; they constitute another manifestation of the performance and another surface through which the event continues to exist.
The work therefore operates across several interconnected forms: movement, video, painting, photography, and the body itself. Each is a different residue of the same encounter.
I am interested in what happens when an intangible experience—tension, desire, fear, grief, uncertainty, the sensation of losing control—is subjected to a physical process and given material form. The work is an attempt to move something from the psychological into the corporeal, from the corporeal into matter, and from matter into an image.
The star is where these transitions become visible. It is not a representation of the experience, but the physical consequence of having moved through it.
What remains is not a representation of the emotion, but its trace.
“The Birth of a Star is the physical manifestation of accumulated tension—a transformation of lived experience from the psychological, through the vessel, into matter.”
- Salty Simon