Acrylic, glitter, crystals on canvas, 60 x 60 cm
From the series: Iconoclasm
Simona MM is not a homage — it’s an undoing. A dissection of the pop icon, stripped of sheen and certainty, and reassembled with exposed seams. It starts with something familiar: a banana, a blonde wig, parted lips. But nothing here wants to please. The image pulls you in, only to refuse you.
The banana — overdetermined, overused, almost hollow in its cultural saturation — reemerges as something unstable. Once a smooth stand-in for sexuality, pleasure, and capitalist consumption, here it’s full of friction. Its surface is no longer slick; it becomes porous, bruised, resistant. It hovers between desire and threat, joke and weapon.
The figure, hyper-feminized to the edge of grotesque, nods toward Warhol’s Marilyn — platinum hair, saturated color, visual excess — but refuses pop art’s clean detachment. Instead of smooth surfaces and clean outlines, we get texture, distortion, aggression. The lips part, but not to seduce — they bite down. The act is not suggestive, but invasive. The mouth consumes. It devours, takes back, refuses to be read as passive or performative.
Crystals shimmer across the eyes — creating a tension between visibility and blindness. Glamour becomes both mask and armor: it dazzles, but it also conceals. What does it mean to be seen when visibility itself is violent? The eyes don’t return the gaze; they repel it.
The gesture of biting the banana may echo Natalia LL’s iconic consumer art, but here, the meaning shifts. This isn’t about being consumed or objectified through repetition. It’s about possession. Domination. The hand gripping the banana is not performing femininity — it’s claiming agency within the field of hyper-visibility. The body does not offer itself to the viewer. It looks back. It consumes the viewer’s gaze, chews it, spits it out.
In Simona MM, the language of pop is queered, fractured, corrupted from within. The polished iconography of celebrity and sex is dragged through something messier: trauma, rage, eroticism, gendered contradiction. The banana — a recurring symbol in both queer and feminist visual vocabularies — becomes something else: not just phallic, not just funny, not just seductive. It is an object of tension. It vibrates with refusal.
Through a trans lens, femininity is no longer projection — it is an act of possession. The figure doesn’t offer herself to be read or consumed. Her presence is distorted, overwhelming, and ultimately unreachable. She is not trying to be legible. She is not asking for love.
This work lingers in discomfort. Between glamour and violence. Between camp spectacle and quiet rage. Between the hunger to be seen and the need to remain opaque. The image denies closure. It bites, and it keeps biting.
Simona MM queers the visual economy of pop, not by parodying it, but by inhabiting it from the inside — and tearing it apart with a glittering mouth, a gaze you’ll never quite meet, and a banana that is neither object nor metaphor, but something more dangerous: a threshold.