Simona Ray is a multidisciplinary artist, whose work investigates the subjectivity of human perception, rooted in her childhood question: "Do you see the same colour I see? And do we see the same colour at all?"
It is not about colour. It is about how differently each of us sees this world. And how rarely we truly see each other, and ourselves.
Everything she makes is directed towards this enquiry, asked in many different ways.
In painting, she mixes metallic paint into her canvases, so each one shifts with the light and with the eye that meets it. The same painting is never the same. A poem arrives mid-brushstroke, written at the easel; the canvas and the poem say what the other cannot. Whether it is her Greek goddess series or a commission, she is uncovering something unique that was always there, only not yet seen.
The enquiry moves beyond the canvas too. In her 2025 performance SEE YOU in Times Square, she returned every hour to stand still for a minute with her question. In her digital interactive work, "Journey: from looking to seeing", four rooms let viewers choose the truth for themselves.
Her work has been displayed in Prague, Madrid, Miami, New York, and Paris.
But for her, the real recognition is quieter: the moment someone finally sees themselves.
Art is a mirror. A breath.
It is a reminder that in all the chaos, we are still human.
Artist Statement:
Who am I? Who are you? What are we doing here?
Do you know? Do you really? I don't - not fully. I only know that what powers me is something I cannot comprehend. All my life I felt locked in a spire, waiting for something that would never come - told to perceive this world a certain way, when it is not that way at all.
It makes me want to fight. This work is how I fight.
I never thought I would be here, presenting my work to you. I never imagined I would paint, write, build an online space that could hold other people. I never thought I would create music from my poetry - yet it fulfils me; it gives me a reason to work through long nights, to create this.
I never even imagined I would become who I am. (but - who am I)
All I remember is a childhood question no one ever knew the answer to: do you see the same colour I see? Perhaps what you see as pink, I see as yellow. For me it is not about colour. It is about truth, about a feeling - and the fragile space where we can try to meet one another.
It feels that words placed endless layers of tape over our eyes, and we believe we can navigate in all that blindness. We are walking, not seeing; we are losing ourselves in the dark.
Where is kindness, where is a spark.
I used to feel sad about the lack of willingness to see one another. Little did I realise I was searching in the wrong place. I was looking around me, instead of seeing on the inside. That is where the real change begins. How can we perceive others for who they truly are if we hide from ourselves every day?
My art has risen from the ashes of who I used to be, with hope that it might encourage others to begin seeing themselves for who they really are.
Every one of us is a unique piece of canvas.
I am presenting you pieces of work created over the past eighteen months - not knowing, while I made them, how connected they were. What they meant. Now I know that I do not know - but I feel. All of it was created from one desire: to see, to understand, to be seen.
Becoming One - Journey of Recognition emerges from the ground laid by Journey of Acceptance - The Core Trilogy. Together they form a Jungian arc of individuation. The trilogy turns inward: first into a merciful forgetting (Lethe & the Cosmic Man), then into the ache of missed opportunity (Tyche & the Faithless), and finally into the confrontation that can no longer be deferred (Ananke's Messenger). It is a descent that ends in permission - to fall, to feel, to admit, and to accept.
The new cycle listens in a different register. Five goddesses take the first-person voice - Theia, Aphrodite, Sophrosyne, Persephone, Euphrosyne - each as a pairing of a painting that changes character under chromatic light and a poem that testifies, not explains. The aim is not to illustrate mythology but to let myth become a language for the interior.
All eight paintings and their poems live together as an online interactive experience at sentienttopaint.art, where each painting can be viewed under many coloured lights to reveal its depth and its many hidden faces — accompanied by the poems I wrote at the easel, now given voice as my own songs.
The same central question travels outside the canvas. In August 2025, I stood for 24 hours in Times Square, motionless in front of magnified paintings: SEE YOU, an extension of Art Queens Gallery's Women Beyond Borders I. The question I held was Do we truly see each other, or do we only look? This August I return in its second iteration, asking Can I see myself? And can you see yourself? I want people to stand beside me, with the kindness they have been struggling to admit themselves. What the paintings ask inside a frame, the performance asks in a public square.
What matters is not whether these figures are 'true' to their myths, but whether they spark inside a viewer's life. In these works, myth is not an escape from reality; it is a technology for articulating it.
Falling is not failure; it is a part of our Becoming. Even I struggle with it sometimes. But who am I to judge.
So I submit this work. I have learnt to dream again — I can fly, without wings. We can all contribute towards a better world. The fright is gone.
Where is kindness, where is a spark.
— Simona Ray
