To Be Seen, Fully: Simona Ray and the Quiet Power of Sentient To Paint

There are artists who make work to be looked at, and then there are artists who make work that looks back. Simona Ray belongs firmly to the latter. Through her practice under Sentient To Paint, Ray is building a body of work that is not concerned with decoration, trends, or surface-level beauty. Instead, it asks something far more uncomfortable and far more necessary: are we truly seeing ourselves and each other, or simply passing through?

Image Credit: Honza Martinec

Ray’s work exists in the space between painting, poetry, performance, and presence. It is introspective without being insular, philosophical without being distant. At its core is a persistent inquiry into identity, inevitability, and emotional truth, themes that recur across her paintings and written work as interconnected chapters rather than isolated statements.

Painting as a state of being

Sentient To Paint is not just a studio name, it is a position. Ray approaches painting as an act of awareness, rooted in the idea that to be sentient is to feel, to register, to respond. Her canvases are often charged with emotional density, built through colour, gesture, and symbolic abstraction rather than literal representation. Faces emerge and dissolve. Forms hover between clarity and obscurity. What matters is not what is shown, but what is recognised.

There is a quiet insistence in her work that growth is unavoidable. Ray frequently references inevitability as a creative and human force, the idea that what we avoid will find its way back to us until it is faced. This philosophical thread runs through multiple series, including works influenced by mythology, where ancient narratives are repurposed as mirrors for modern inner conflict. Gods, in Ray’s hands, are no longer distant figures of power, but reflections of vulnerability, contradiction, and desire.

Image Credit: Honza Martinec

SEE YOU: presence as confrontation

Perhaps the most defining project in Ray’s practice to date is SEE YOU, a work that extends far beyond the canvas. First presented as a live performance in Times Square ,as part of Women Beyond Borders, the international exhibition curated by Art Queens Gallery, dedicated to amplifying women’s voices on a global stage, the project SEE YOU placed the artist physically within one of the loudest, fastest, most visually saturated environments in the world.

For twenty four hours, Ray returned every hour to stand in stillness beneath towering digital billboards displaying her paintings. The act was disarmingly simple. No spectacle. No movement. No demand for attention. And yet, within that simplicity lay the project’s power. In a space built on consumption and distraction, Ray offered presence. She asked passersby not to look, but to see.

SEE YOU is not about performance in the theatrical sense. It is about confrontation through calm. It challenges the viewer to acknowledge another human being without context, without narrative shortcuts, without scrolling past. In doing so, it raises a broader question about contemporary life: how often do we allow ourselves to be truly present, and how often do we allow others to be fully seen?

Image Credit: Honza Martinec

August: returning to Times Square

This August, Ray will return to Times Square as part of a new release with Women Beyond Borders, continuing her collaboration with the global platform that champions female artists on an international stage. Alongside this, she is planning a further evolution of the SEE YOU project, expanding its conceptual reach while maintaining its original emotional core.

Rather than repeating the work, Ray is intent on developing it. SEE YOU is not a finished statement but an ongoing conversation, one that adapts to context, audience, and moment. Its upcoming iteration promises to deepen the dialogue around visibility, connection, and emotional honesty in an increasingly fragmented world.

Beyond the canvas

In parallel with her visual work, Ray’s poetry functions as an extension of her paintings. Written with the same immediacy and vulnerability, her words often read like internal monologues that have found their way onto the page. They are not explanatory texts for the paintings, but companion pieces, offering another entry point into the emotional landscape she is mapping.

Commissioned works also form part of her practice, where she translates personal stories and emotional experiences into bespoke paintings. Each commission becomes a collaborative act of trust, requiring both artist and subject to sit with what is unspoken. The result is work that is deeply individual yet universally resonant.

Credit: Nikola Vesela

An artist of presence, not noise

In an art world increasingly driven by speed, spectacle, and instant recognition, Simona Ray’s work resists easy consumption. It asks for time. It asks for honesty. It asks for stillness. Through Sentient To Paint, she is not offering answers but creating spaces where questions can exist without resolution.

As she prepares to return to Times Square on August 15th, again in collaboration with Women Beyond Borders and Art Queens Gallery, and to further unfold the SEE YOU project, Ray continues to position herself as an artist of presence rather than performance, depth rather than display. Her work does not shout to be noticed. It waits. And in that waiting, it asks us to meet it halfway.

To see, and to be seen, fully.