After a few years of silence, Simafra finally returns offering us a new series of works on show in the San Lorenzo district of Rome. This time, to welcome the Artist, there is not an exclusive Gallery in the heart of Mayfair in London or Los Angeles but a series of deliberately unadorned rooms in a neighborhood known up until a few years ago as a “popular neighborhood”, which today is a place of culture, lively exchange, intellectual growth, and a meeting place for young students enthusiastically looking for a personal identity.

The title of the exhibition, FORTY-NINE, is strongly evocative: the number FORTY-NINE, according to classical numerology, is a symbol of security and progress.
FORTY-NINE is the unostentatious Substance. FORTY-NINE are the possible interpretations of the Scriptures according to the Zohar, the “book of splendor” of Kabbalah. The pineal gland, the third eye, forms in the fetus within FORTY-NINE days of conception.

Forty-nine days is the amount of time necessary, according to Buddhism, for the soul of the deceased to reincarnate in another earthly body.
Simafra arrives in San Lorenzo after having voluntarily completed a “Rite of Passage” in which the Artist rejected the proposals of a world that was certainly captivating but that he did not really feel like his own, in order to listen intimately to the Unknown, the Uncomfortable, the UNPREDICTABLE, in a world of the Real.

Simafra arrives here after having reformulated his own History, spatulating away the “Klimtian” gold of the previous Works with the incongruous, often illogical, sometimes shocking colors of his own tensions, fears, tears. While the sunset of Certainties has gradually
given way to the dawn of Awareness, the choice to return “to the origins” was then revealed for Simafra as “the Origin”.

While the process was becoming unstoppable, beyond TIME and SPACE, the search for TRUTH beyond Life, the search for deep Silence beyond the noise, the search for RELIEF beyond wounds, the search for the INFINITE SELF proceeded unstoppable for Simafra beyond the finite self.
And here, in the course of real pictorial trances, Man became the Environment, a living Animal or Carcass Animal, Man was transfigured into a fifth primordial element in harmony with Fire, Earth, Water, and Air.

The canvases have expanded, sometimes to unexpected dimensions, because arms, mind, and eyes can have no boundaries when the irrepressible need to narrate oneself comes.
And if we think back to the Works in the exhibitions Humus or Aequilibrium, we cannot fail to notice how Simafra’s Painting has become unpredictable, sometimes ANGRY but never accidental or ideal. Just like ideal nor accidental EXISTENCE can be.

The royal gold and purple Peacock of Eden has been transfigured, due to an inevitably awaited spell, into a passionate red Lion, in a tormented search for a safe den in which to lick his wounds.
The self-centered Artist-Proclaimer steps aside and leaves the stage to the wounded and, precisely because he is wounded, aware Artist-Narrator.

The Dominant Man-Body finally becomes a Communicative Man-Body Art, and finally becomes ETHICAL ART.
Therefore, this pictorial narration of Simafra, if on the one hand tries to restore a broken balance, on the other it allows us to recognize that, in truth, Life will always continue to be interrupted. And we walk along this Exhibition with the comfortable reassurance that we no longer have to look for a single epilogue of History. At least not for FORTY-NINE days.