The Idiot
The Idiot – Raphaela Simon
March 3rd to May 10th , 2025
In The Idiot, Raphaela Simon creates a pictorial space where the everyday becomes an enigma and the recognizable dissolves into abstraction. Her figures, objects, and scenes seem to hover in an uncertain threshold, evoking a sense of estrangement that unsettles the viewer. This ambiguity manifests both in her forms and in the very title of the exhibition, which references Fiódor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, a novel that questions the notions of innocence, lucidity, and madness in a world dominated by cynicism and cruelty.
In the novel, Prince Myshkin, the “idiot,” is a character whose purity and compassion clash with the brutality of the society around him. His apparent naïveté is not mere ignorance but rather a radically different form of perception, one that challenges power structures and the established order. In this sense, the “idiot” is not just a fool but also a visionary ; someone who sees beyond social conventions and accesses a reality that others cannot, or refuse to, acknowledge.
In Raphaela Simon’s work, this idea translates into images that oscillate between the obvious and the enigmatic. Her paintings present figures with vacant expressions and hollow gazes, faces that resemble masks, and bodies that suggest both vulnerability and resilience. These figures recall Dostoyevsky’s characters—beings caught in a state of emotional and existential tension, where the boundary between the human and the spectral becomes blurred. In her recent pictorial explorations, Simon has worked with heads and faces that function as veils, simultaneously concealing and revealing. Here, the face becomes a metaphor for the fragility of identity and the internal struggle between what is displayed and what remains hidden.
Objects in her paintings are not mere decorative elements; much like in The Idiot, where every object and gesture carries deep symbolic weight, in "The Idiot", objects seem imbued with an unsettling presence. The materiality of her paintings, with their accumulated layers and use of stitched textiles, reinforces this sense of the hidden and the repressed—of something that is partially revealed but never fully disclosed.
Ultimately, "The Idiot" is an exploration of painting as a space of resistance to immediate interpretation. Simon invites us to inhabit uncertainty, to contemplate the possibility that, in a world obsessed with clarity and rationality, true wisdom may lie in what we do not fully understand—in what remains at the threshold of vision and thought.
Raphaela Simon (b. 1986, Villingen)
Is known for her paintings of simple, non-distinct forms set against monochromatic backdrops. To make these, the artist works in several stages, overpainting and modifying elements in a slow, continuous process. Simon generates forms of palimpsest, with colours shining through the different layers, adding nuances to the compositions. Often evoking portraits, Simon’s works are titled after ordinary objects and motifs, thereby suggesting a latent figurative potential; through this action, the artist plays with the desire of the viewer to imbue abstract forms with meaning. Since 2018, Simon has also been creating elaborate objects and figures in fabric which, carefully staged, develop their own narration and a dialogue with the works on canvas.