CURED

Plinth is delighted to champion CURED – a solo show by Fleur Simon, curated by Sammi Gale and Emily Watkins, at 65a Charlotte Street, W1T 4PJ, October 13-18.

CURED coincides with Simon’s collaboration with British design institution Heal’s, facilitated by Plinth. The artist and Plinth developed a series of limited editions alongside a new original work commissioned exclusively for Heal’s as part of their Heal’s Discovers 2026 campaign.

Fleur Simon: CURED
October 13, PREVIEW: 12-6pm; PV: 6-8pm
October 14-18 2026: 12-6pm 

Design by Purdy Studio

Text by Sammi Gale and Emily Watkins

‘Toothier and more photographic’, in the artist’s words, CURED represents the latest evolution in Fleur Simon’s practice: ‘My paintings will probably always function as psychological landscapes, but maybe they’re becoming less literal landscapes now, even if I’m still pulling from some of those formats.’

The show’s title itself nods to her signature medium – coloured resins, poured either in layers or simultaneously, before being left to dry or ‘cure’. In several instances here, happy accidents have resulted in a new frothy texture, baked into the works by the summer’s extraordinary heatwaves: their environment preserved, like insects in amber. 

In Simon’s process – her own kind of ‘action painting’, open to the chance of each pour – as well as in the end results, there is a tension between the fleeting moment and the markedly durable. Both the technique and the works themselves are at once meditatively slow and thrillingly uncontrolled; gravity, tilting and the incidents of one pigment meeting another birth compositions that could be microscope slides of human cells on the one hand, riverbeds viewed from airplane windows on the other. 

"meditatively slow and thrillingly uncontrolled"

In stark contrast to their searing title, the minimal washes of colour and air bubbles trapped in the three panels of White Heat recall ocean spray and spume; waves crashing on a shore, suspended forever. Almost soothing – yet in Inky Bleed, the same method of composition results in a tar-like tableau, recalling something preserved in formaldehyde in need of further study. Beneath each work’s glossy surface, a tug of war between artificial and organic, ominous and sublime. Watching paint dry never felt so portentous.

"in CURED Simon presents work that is both poison and remedy"

Whereas Simon’s earlier works are more explicitly abstract, ‘I’m more focused on the body now, and its functions, seeing that as a kind of new landscape,’ she says. As such, ‘what might have once resembled water droplets now look like hair follicles or skin lacerations. What could have been clouds now looks like spit, or vernix coating something.’

Besides the work’s process of solidification, Simon’s title has another meaning: not only does her resin generate pieces that resemble pathologies, it is itself noxious when wet. Playfully transposed with art’s supposed capacity for improving wellbeing, in CURED Simon presents work that is both poison and remedy. 

Echoing the medium’s straddling of motion and inertia, the exhibition itself encompasses small movements. Visit more than once, and you might notice a triptych’s panels switch places; two works swap walls. Like Simon’s work, CURED accepts that there is no such thing as its titular promise – even when the resin is dry and the medicine taken, restlessness remains. Now what?