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Filippo Menna - 1968
Conversing with
Simona Weller
F.M. - First of all, I would like to say that
your recent works and the works from a few years
ago are strongly consistent in terms of themes and
language. The themes are recurrent, and this leads
me to believe that you get your inspiration from
a well defined environmental context.
S.W. - Of course I do. I in fact believe that living
in a natural environment like the countryside, where
I live and work, inspires and influences everything
I do. It therefore becomes instinctive for me to
express myself in a language related to the life
cycle as I see it in the countryside: the animals
that fight and devour each other to survive, the
way they love, the way they die… My eye on
nature also gives me a sense of contact with reality
which, looked at with the right adjustments, is
not very different from what we actually see and
breathe in this world.
F.M. - So, what elements of nature are most frequently
present on your image repertoire.
S.W. - There was a time in which I was into a pre-natal
world made of growing larvae, roots, bulbs, seeds;
then, in the following months, this world developed…
For example, what excited me the most in the changing
of seasons was to find, together with the first
crumpled up leaves, the empty shells of snails and
crabs, the nymphs or empty skins of the insects,
snake sloughs like see-through cortex, or dead toads,
dried up in the sun; and even some decomposing flowers
looking like animals…
F.M. - Yes, I find that these factors perfectly
correspond to the reality of your work, which I
would classify within an idea of metamorphosis.
In your works, images are never determined, never
fixed into a finished and discrete form, but they
take up forms that are always different, so I should
probably say that your work lives in the idea of
cycle: copulation, birth, death, rebirth, so there
is, I think, a deep cultural mediation with roots
in the far past, and that I would define of alchemic-esoteric
nature. Not just violence and death but birth, a
strong sense of the cycle of existence.
S.W. - Why not call it vitalism? This feeling life
so deeply… I do not agree when you speak of
metamorphosis, because I think this word implies
a transformation from one form to another, whereas
my research is based on an analysis of shapes that
modify during their life cycle. I admit that something
that's alive is so different from something that's
dead to actually give the feeling of a total transformation,
almost a metamorphosis. I would also like to object
to another word you used (please excuse me): it's
the word "alchemic-esoteric", which implies
a concept for which I feel a certain suspiciousness
and, though it may confer me a suggestive label,
it is after all restrictive…
F.M. - I understand and partly share your suspiciousness
for labels. It is a bit of a recurring dispute between
critics and artists, who generally refuse to be
caged in terms that are excessively "closed"
and excessively "final": but, on the other
hand, I would like to say, more in general, that
we always speak within a frame of abstraction and
by schemes, just because each word is by itself
already a scheme which tries to confine reality
in order to share it with others, to communicate.
Therefore, words never have a final character. They
are just meant as indications, we shoot to see if
we can catch what we are looking for…I agree
with you about the fact that the word metamorphosis
doesn't perfectly catch the sense of your work because
what you are looking for (and you speak of vitalism,
which is right, I think) is, rather, a way to develop
a sort of organic matrix, in its undifferentiated
state, from which anything can originate. Concerning
the alchemic-esoteric character, I think that you
shouldn't be too suspicious towards such a term
because it is just a cultural mediation between
you and nature. After all, any reality cannot be
observed but through a cultural mediation which
makes us part of a certain era, of a certain historical
time.
This alchemic-esoteric root is deep rooted in the
modern culture that gives origin to your works,
i.e. a trend that I would call "organicistic",
the trend that fed some of the poetics of surrealism
which, from this, have then passed on to the informal
domain: I am talking about all the poetics in which
the natural element is observed in its undifferentiated
matrix state.
In order to place your work in a more precise context,
I believe it is appropriate to point out that these
themes of death, violence, nature dissolution can
take up a precise historical meaning, being the
symbol of a wider and more general vital condition.
Naples, November 1968
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Marcello Venturoli
- 1969
Simona Weller and the Secrets
of Nature
Nowadays, the art situation in terms of techniques
is very free, and the peculiarity of a way of painting
is not as determining as it was some decades ago;
I however believe that Simona Weller's painting
should first of all be presented from a technical
point of view: it is not essentially graphic work,
because the artists uses pastels, oils and enamels
in a very measured tone choice; it is not painting
- at least if we consider the brush strokes, "placed"
on the canvas in a more or less uniform stratification
- because the precise encapsulation of shapes as
hair signs on drooling white is a peculiarity of
the drypoint; it is not etching, not just because
each one of Simona Weller's works cannot be repeated,
as a unique specimen of these lying prints, but
because these charts or maps of nature's charm is
conferred mostly by the emerging of a colour rather
than by sign inventory, and colour and sign combine,
constituting a work of its own.
In Simona Weller's previous exhibitions, I, Filiberto
Menna and others already emphasized the artist's
autonomous (and slightly counter-current) trend.
By taking up forms of neo-liberty, Simona Weller
contests informal irrationality; however, instead
of turning over to a decorative path, she meditates
on rural life and nature, on archaeology and fossils,
with a lens-like imagination. The choice of the
topics, the constantly stinging and alarmed climate
in combining an item with another, or an item, link
or explode is not a literary or merely convenient
choice: in every detail of her world, we can feel
the direct cross-reference to the model and to its
environment, we feel that platform of naturalness
of painted subjects which only artists who always
live with these items have. And this is Simona Weller's
case; she can enjoy the entire cycle of seasons
from her country house, she can perform daily acknowledgements
of the intact landscape, though with the cultivated
and refined eye of a city person.
We can say that all the works of this unique painter
reflect the amazement, which never became abandonment
or, worse, habit, of those who are closely linked
to nature, of those who, according to their own
culture and imagination, must solve this relationship,
which is so elementary in its formulation (nature-culture)
and so difficult and risky to find, without having
to distort one of the two terms.
In her previous exhibitions, Simona Weller has developed
very precise themes and experiences: becoming fond
of the evolution of nature as if it were a laboratory
survey she had lost the data of, reconstructing
it with strokes of imagination; combining fossil
findings to pages of ornithology, entomology, anthropomorphic
co-protagonist silhouettes. In this second phase
(see the exhibition at Galleria Pater in Milan),
the human figure indicates the need of a less occasional
nature survey, a necessity to emphasize the stories
told, putting them in a dialectic frame that is
closer to man. This second experience may not have
had satisfactory results (as it holds a misunderstanding
between figuration and abstraction) but it definitely
indicates a problem that gives rise to a survey.
In the personal exhibition in Naples, presented
by Filiberto Menna, the artist exposes a whole repertoire
of approaches to the secrets of nature and
matter (from a butterfly's wing, its ramifications,
and from these the veins, entering the microscope)
repeating her amazements into serial images, an
artistic step she also used to focus on this other
"agricultural instrument".
This last glorious phase has witnessed the need
to not give the same importance to different eras,
objects and animals, human things and nature things
in a sort of compromise between love and amazement,
instead conserving each item's value (as she did
in the Naples exhibition) as a redeemed finding
in the painting image, relating it to the presence
of man, giving this presence a non unrealistic centre,
no more in relation to an anthropomorphic way but
in relation to a symbolic way.
We here randomly witness insects, roots, bulbs,
bone shapes, frogs, seashells, tools, wheels; although,
this random order is no more the main (or only)
character of the picture; it rather tends to become
its background, its scene, while the close up is
that of something that is present and vital, useful
and necessary to man, a harrow, a fire, as can be
seen in the three paintings presented: "Cose
del fuoco" ("Fire things"), "Nascita
di un solco" ("Birth of a furrow"),
"Cose dell'aria" ("Air things").
We already emphasized on the fact that, at the base
of the culture and attitude of the artists, there
isn't a mere tribute to unconscious in a more or
less stated surrealistic way; the concreteness of
the analysis, the way of assembling the objects
rather trigger our imagination in hyperboles, without
considering that surrealism has always had (as a
document and never as a catharsis) a pessimistic
foundation: in Weller's work instead (and especially
in these last works) we feast a vitalistic tension,
an authentic enthusiasm for the miracles of nature,
in which human presence, its work, its efforts do
not seem any less amazing.
Rome, December 1969
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Enrico Crispolti
- 1972
Syllabise Reality
It is clearly important to underline that the work
developed by Simona Weller in 1971 and 1972 is already
in contrast with her earlier paintings, thus introducing
in Rome a new writing-painting hypothesis that resembles
Novelli's writing-painting, rather than the writing-image
of Baruchello.
During the Fifities in Rome, Twombly and Novelli
gave birth to the very interesting phenomenon of
written-painting: this turned out to be a very unique
and original event in the wider horizon of the figurative-writing
hypotheses (i.e. Fahlström and Arakawa). In
Twombly, this medium revealed a lyrical and autobiographical
foundation, an evocative writing made of true conflicting
and personal confessions; in Novelli, the medium
was objectively dreamlike, including aurorean childish
and mythological elements.
I feel that Simona Weller, in a playground made
of an objective storytelling of its own kind, brings
forth this very last aspect, almost intending to
respell the primary aspects of reality. Her works
are therefore not visionary, but rather narrative.
Although her tales are above all "in potential",
figuratively spelling the primary instruments of
a possible told plot on daily relationships.
This is why the names and the imagined physical
elements of the colours entirely occupy, colour
by colour, some of her canvases; and this is why
other canvases suggest the reiteration (almost a
verification) of the name and of the object, an
animal, of an elementary and primary aspect of nature
(sea, tree, etc.).
In her most complex paintings, these figurative
syllabifications and enumerations, just like a child's
drawing, a child's figuring, and just like handwriting
in a copybook, form an objective hypothesis for
the recovery of a heavenly childish dimension but
- and even more so- of a true primordial representation
of the essence of figuration and therefore of "narrative
description".
Maybe the true story will never be told, probably
because it doesn't even relate, in its essence,
to Simona Weller. However, her current involvement
seems to be preparing speculation (or at least the
possibility to speculate) on each element, looking
the internal resonance, the particular arrays of
a colour of a name, of a notion.
Rome, April 1972
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Enrico Crispolti
- 1972
Risillabare la realtà
Forse non sarà improprio avvertire nel lavoro
che Simona Weller ha realizzato nel '71 e nel '72,
e che è nuovo rispetto alle immediate vicende
della sua pittura precedente, un modo di riproporre
a Roma un'ipotesi di scrittura-immagine nella maniera
della pittura-scrittura di Novelli piuttosto che
in quello della scrittura-immagine di Baruchello.
Con Twombly e con Novelli a Roma si è verificata
in effetti una vicenda assai notevole di pittura
scritta, dallo scorcio degli anni Cinquanta: una
vicenda anche che risulta particolare e originale
nel più ampio orizzonte di ipotesi appunto
di scrittura figurante (da Fahlström ad Arakawa,
per intenderci). E che ha un fondamento lirico,
e autobiografico, declinato da Twombly in scrittura
evocativa di tutta confessione, scontrosa e privata;
da Novelli in un oggettivato onirismo, che includeva
anche l'utilizzazione di mitologiche aurorali e
infantili.
Ora la Weller, su un terreno a suo modo di oggettivato
racconto, mi sembra che porti avanti proprio quest'ultimo
aspetto, quasi intendendo risillabare da tale base
gli aspetti primari della realtà. Non è
dunque onirica, piuttosto è direttamente
in certo modo narrativa. Anche se il suo racconto
è in realtà soprattutto "in nuce",
per ora inteso a sillabare figuralmente gli strumenti
primari di un possibile svolgimento narrato del
rapporto quotidiano.
Per questo i nomi e la fisicità immaginata
dei colori occupano interamente, colore per colore
alcune sue tele; e così altre suggeriscono
la scansione iterativa (quasi accertativa) del nome
di un oggetto, di un animale, di un aspetto elementare
e primario della natura (mare, albero, ecc.).
Queste sillabazioni ed enumerazioni figurali, come
il disegno infantile, e il figurare infantile, e
la stessa scrittura da quaderno di scuola, nei dipinti
più complessi forma appunto un'oggettivata
ipotesi di recupero non tanto di una vera e propria
dimensione aurorale e infantile, quanto di una condizione
direi "a monte" del figurare, e appunto
del figurare narrativamente.
Forse il racconto vero e proprio non verrà
mai, perché probabilmente non interessa neppure,
nel suo dipanarsi, la Weller. Comunque il suo attuale
impegno mi sembra quello in certo modo di prepararlo
- o almeno di prepararne la possibilità -
speculando su ogni elemento, cercandone le interne
risonanze, le gamme particolari, di un colore, di
un nome, di una nozione.
Roma, Aprile 1972
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Federica Di Castro
- 1972
Exiting Art Infancy
Painting as a means of knowledge. Knowledge of a small,
intimate world that can be dilated to a universe.
This is what Simona Weller's pages-pictures tell me.
Knowledge is the opposite of decoration, but it can
integrate it, comprehend it. The world studied by
S. Weller is a world of childhood, the pages of a
first grade book where handwriting is painting and
image is a story, the story of a day, the excitement
of a discovery in which sign and colour wonderfully
coexist.
Every letter of the alphabet has a colour, just like
it has a sound; every word is an image, every sheet
has a "tone" determined by all these elements
and an emotional echo. In this context, it seems to
me that Simona Weller substantially differs from the
other artists who, like her, chose to employ a written-painting
technique- such as Novelli and Twombly- in that her
interest for this very language is an attenuation
of that world that uses that expressive medium, rather
than being an attenuation of the medium itself. In
this specific case, the world of a childhood that
discovers its expressive mediums right when it which
also discovers that these mediums can be controlled,
tameable, but just a second before this happens. Because
there is a childish language in unconscious - the
language so deeply investigated by Klee-, a completely
intuitive language filled with significant stratifications:
the magical uncontrolled world close to limbo, to
the buried civilizations which characterizes the drawings
of two-three-four year old children.
Simona Weller's attention is instead very precise
and it is focused on the moment in which we say farewell
to limbo, to conquer the reason of knowledge; to reach,
with time and after a long path, passing through a
different side of that ancient world, that mystery
of the source.
The discovery of the medium, the discovery of the
language, of the reference points which are the same
for everyone, the discovery of an unsuspected objectivity
that belongs to us all: it is what the first pages
of our childhood notebooks tell us when we look at
them in amazement. Then the mediums become familiar
and our time becomes a dispenser of mediums, of many
mediums of expression and acquisition.
The artist's problem is the medium, meaning that the
artist always fears lack of authenticity, he doesn't
trust the medium, he almost cannot believe that that
is his/her medium. Because languages are available
to everyone and it is hard to recognize the one that
really belongs to us.
Simona Weller's story hits the world of creativity
in a very wide sense, it extends to the relationship
between the artist and his/her language, more than
between the artist and his/her work or between the
artist and his/her public. It opens the way to thought
about the relationships between the emotional world
and the expressive world, it leads to considerations
on the value of choice. Beyond the page of a notebook,
where the image acquires an audible meaning and where
it is filled with dramatic features and sweetness
and anger and joy and seasons and light and day hours,
beyond the childish freshness that Weller's painting
gives us back, intact, there is a series of issues
that penetrate the intimate but dilatable world of
creativity, in its most tangled knot; the knot that
prevents matter from entering the world of awareness;
the most intense moment, the moment in which the artist
steps out of the childhood of art.
Rome, April 1972
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Cesare Vivaldi - 1974
Simona Weller's Chromatic
Variations
Simona Weller now has had a quite long painting history,
considering that she has been exhibiting since 1959
with an evolution that brought her to refine her expressive
mediums to the maximum; the sign-colour intended as
writing, giving up -as time goes by- any foreign element
that isn't relevant in her language: a language filled
up with echoes and semantic relevance, soaked with
lights and snows and dawns, but which only lives by
itself and for itself and just is, in the analysis
that the artist makes by using it, the only object
and substance of the painting.
After her debut as a teenager, Simona Weller has for
years carried out thin surveys in a neo-informal domain,
whose aim was to especially study what I could define
"chance's writings"; footsteps, traces,
trails and their relationships with the primary elements
(water, earth, air, fire) on which and in which they
were written.
In 1970 and, more strongly, in 1971, her attention
turned to the world of childhood, to handwriting and
to childish drawing and it is since this very moment
that her art definitely undertook the character of
a very original written-painting, which can though
be inserted (as I was noting back then and as stated
by Enrico Crispolti in 1972 when he presented Simona
Weller's exhibition in Rome) in the recent roman tradition
of Twombly and Novelli.
The following step, dating back to 1973 and 1974,
was the rejection of any pretext (the childhood world,
indeed) which may deviate the artist's interest from
a writing intended as a sign-chromatic "ductus"
in which the ancient primary elements, drastically
reduced to a simple light-matter dialectics, come
back, transformed into "continuums" of words
stubbornly spelled and respelled through new chromatic
variations and new space-time inventions.
For Weller's current work we could certainly speak
about "new painting", to use a terminology
that is trendy and not exact, as it is applicable
to too many heterogeneous personalities. Personally,
I prefer to relate her original written-painting to
that neo-informal area that is quite interestingly
extending to the international level and which might
also include Ryman himself, together with Twombly,
not to speak of Dorazio's late works. An informal
art (and please forgive the generic word used) seen
with an informal eye that pays attention to the the
problems that exclusively pertain to painting even
technique, refusing the existential anguish and the
exasperated egotism of "gesture".
Rome, October 1974
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Marisa Volpi Orlandini
- 1976
Simona Weller and the Continuous
Discovery of Pictorial Immagination
In Simona Weller's most recent paintings, which are
horizontal canvases heavily impregnated with variations
of colour on colour, a repeated rectangular tessera
appears to structure the painting rhythmically. A
structure that Simona refers to Mondrian in her dedications.
Naturally it is the Mondrian who he passed from a
realistic and expressive period to a more critical
and thoughtful one; the period when he painted the
woods at Oele, the windmills, the hats, and when he
used the divisionist tache of fauve
colour, as if a grid, or structure. This a process
of disenchantment that Mondrian, mystic and idealist,
will never stop, except in his noted abstract paintings
of horizontally and vertically divided surfaces.
Various decades have passed from when abstract painting
emerged and Simona Weller's experiences begin when
the an already totally decodified situation. Her first
starting point was the handwriting of children, and
the poetry of a totally uncertain page, imitated in
the pure desire to sketch typical of the child. After
the transposition of the poetic in the visual, and
the visual in the poetic, the painter arrives at a
pictorially much more important phase, when her horizontal
lines of handwriting impaginate a composition already
gridded with vertical lines of regular paint drippings.
The way in which Simona Weller paints is simple, but
very articulated; she prepares the background of the
canvas with tempera, then she traces her handwriting
in crayon, and then for the lines which over-lay the
work she uses a large brush to reinforce the visual
horizontal theme.
The various phases: preparation, design, writing,
daubing, dripping, then writing again are overlaid
and merge together but in such a way as to leave the
individual processes legible. The result is a "constructive"
texture that belongs to the rhythmical tradition of
the coloured paintings of Van Gogh's last period,
or in those of Seurat, Monet, Dorazio - even more
than the expressive graphics of the informal American
school or of Twombly.
However, we have not, hitherto, referred to the lyrical
motivation of this painter, who as a woman, confides
in these with assurance. The relationship I-nature,
I-unconscious, often excluded or left neglected, is
instead chosen with enthusiasm by Weller. It is sufficient
to think of titles like Turquoise vibrations on
the word sea, Dawn, Grass-Homage to Seurat, Ochre
variations on the word wave, where the words grass,
dawn, sea, wave, have a magical character. In fact,
communication is based on, not the word wave, but
by the real sensation given by a wave or by the sea
or by the dawn. The subtle play is between the title
that announces a semantic origin in a literary sense,
and the painting that alludes physically to Nature;
a nature towards which the painter seems to be drawn
with a passion. Nature and the countryside reveal
their symbolic essence as other than themselves, the
universe, the unknown, the unconscious, in infinite
changes of colour, from beauty to desolation.
It is symptomatic that the aspect of abstract painting
derived from the impressionism has been hidden by
the puritanical intentions of historical avant-gardes,
particularly by Constructionism, by the Bauhaus and
its followers, who all tried to formulate the problem
of modern style; and thus they tried in every way
to eliminate the individual's relationship with his
perception of himself and with the world. This relationship
has become ever more embarrassing from the seventeenth
century onwards.
The rules and teaching laid down, with great care,
from the period of the intuitive discoveries of the
impressionists, have relegated to the sidelines personal
sensitivity that had been at the centre of the impressionist
movement - suffice to think of the apotheosis of Monet.
It is not entirely casual that this "individual
relationship with oneself and art" has re-emerged
in the last four or five years after various attempts
to put it to the side. Polarisations of this romantic
and "Schopenhauer like" feeling have been
seen within the Informal Movement from Pollock to
Burri, and obviously have never been disappeared.
However, it would now appear that the crisis of society
has reached the point of releasing us from rational
and constructive pressures, and the individual's relationship
with his innermost feelings becomes completely free;
free to make one's own codification language. This
is found not only in painting, but also in any artistic
performance.
In Simona Weller's painting Violet variations on
the word sea, she is really declaring her act
of faith in contact with nature, with the force that
surrounds the individual and substantiates him.
Linguistically speaking, her personal culture is certainly
related to the formal tradition of colour from the
Post-impressionists to Dorazio (formal and not formalistic).
On the other hand, the vibrant note that I find present
and still vaguely seeking a solution is her romantic
explicitation and thus a painting such as "Dawn",
one of those which I prefer, makes me think of an
allusion to certain landscapes of Friedrich. And it
is in this female (and romantic) side of our modern
culture that I find extraordinary in Simona Weller
the continuing discover of herself in reflection and
pictorial imagination.
Rome, February 1976
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Luigi Lambertini
- 1977
Simona Weller: a Path Toward
the Unconscious
We shouldn't get carried away by memories, by the
amazement of the past. It might ruin the objectiveness
of the story. When an image triggers the trap of memory,
it immediately releases some sort of sympathy and
personal participation. Nevertheless, as far as I
am concerned, in Simona Weller's paintings I cannot
do otherwise, and this goes beyond any critical issue
and any thought on language, beyond any consideration
on her work's position within our modern times, which
are so uncertain, so dramatically tense and contradictory.
I find myself fully involved, confused by different
feelings. At first I was reluctant to confess it,
but then, thinking about it, I realized that it was
unfair to not tell, because what I was hiding would
have immediately come out to the eyes of a careful
reader. And that's not all.
We should, once for all, wonder whether or not it's
appropriate to face things naturally and sincerely.
Someone may though object that what Simona Weller's
painting suggests to me is just the result of my private
experience, of issues that belong to me only. Well,
Sir, that may be true but only up to a certain point!
And here, just for you, I have a thought that dates
back to many years ago, but which is still very true.
In an unfinished posthumous essay named "Philosophical
Art", Baudelaire states that "every good
sculpture, every good painting, every good music suggests
the feelings and the thoughts it is meant to suggest".
Well, Simona Weller's work is soaked with a sea air,
with the echoes of far away voices, not yet covered
by the noises of a highway, but just scattered out
like sudden kids' yells, disturbed by some call -
a name shouted from a window- which then fades while
refracting its own echo; then the backwash dominates
again, re-launching, almost in flights, the salty
taste, the smell of the nets, of the seashells and
of the cuttlebones in the sun.
It is a return to an ever-present childhood- and we
will later explain the concept-; a return to "now",
today just like yesterday. And with this return, many
more vibrations, suggestions, silences between the
palm trees and the pine trees overlooking the sea,
in the pathways of lime homes, between the deserted
gardens of (apparently) isolated villas, and the waiting
of youth, of a season in which everything - images,
sounds, smells and encounters- tastes like a dreamt
reality which must come true, which is the desire
of something that is developing and growing within
us.
And then the light which dazzles, splitting the palm
trees' fans, falling on the stork's bills and stealing
their perfume, on the agaves and on the rose-bay,
maybe in a small slumbering train station… and
it is not just a physical fact. It is much more than
that, and very different. Nature thus becomes feeling
and sense, sensation and happening; it becomes a character,
just like each one of us is or was and, at the same
time, it becomes a fair copy notebook on which we
are about to write, watching that we do not fold the
margins of the page and that we do not stain or smudge
the last word.
It is childhood or youth, coming back with their fragrance,
their naivety , their dreams and their dramas, though
often very small. The hand runs slowly on the paper
and word take up their own shape: sea (written with
the rhythm of the waves); waves (the same way) and
then grass, sky and much more.
A childhood that was lost just like paradise, a childhood
that we take with us and that we look for. And it's
not a game or an artifice. We must be clear, ready
to catch the glimpses of memory of a second that isn't
now, but which now emerges, recalled, evoked; looking
within ourselves, transferring (with a simultaneity
that is sense and feeling) today's reality in yesterday's
reality by using some autobiography, just as much
as necessary to write pages addressed to others as
well.
Therefore, the enchantment of colour, page after page,
seems to widen up, to catch us and contaminate us,
it seems to make us part of a happening and of another
and another, wrapping us up in a slight "spleen".
A page therefore immediately changes to another by
overlapping; the light filters through the colours
in a slanted fashion and colour becomes light -though,
actually, it was light already-; sign and word transform
to reference points, to obstacles that are only apparent,
and we immediately realize that they are catch and
pause areas from which the eye can move to continue
its path, to see what has already been seen and to
recreate it once more.
Writing, sign and their value; a very unique value.
Writing and sign, handwriting and short background
made of brush strokes, which, one next to the other,
are mystery and revelation in the expression of a
world born of childhood and youth; they are colour,
rhythm, cadenza, pause, overlapping, sequence, tone,
voice and attenuation.
But all of this would be incomplete, or rather, it
would be partial, if, in Simona Weller's work, we
didn't consider- together with this courage of being
in nature and in reality, translated not only into
a pure call of atmospheres and colours- the contemporary
implication and that kind of considerations on those
instruments that culture has provided us with and
that Simona managed to capture in her personal exploration.
For the past, we have recalled the colours of the
late Van Gogh and some Divisionist cadences (the recurring
names are those of Seurat and Monet) and then we focused
on the value of writing and sign, until we mentioned
Twombly. Plus, when Weller composed her paintings
with a series of dowels from which colour dripped,
somebody mentioned the name of Mondrian, the dunes,
nature's transition phase, the transition phase of
reality towards its mystical invention of absolute
and concrete equilibrium. And this is right, if we
consider it with the due caution and without declutching.
I in fact do not believe that Simona Weller's reality
can be restricted, without further explanation, within
predefined limits; it cannot be, as we say today,
"coded". Hers is mainly a human attitude,
the attitude of a person that looks around consciously
and with a critical eye, of a person who also considers
what the past has brought to her, but especially of
a person able to look inside herself. Her journey
is therefore sentimental, but only up to a certain
point. It is the result of a survey that allows something
completely different to emerge. Her thoughts on the
language of painting, on language and on painting
and on painting as a language is, in other words,
the element used to express herself and to existentially
define her own reality and to come out of it at the
same time.
It is therefore an introspection and a path within
her unconscious, operated with aware attention, but
also with slight participation. And that's not all.
If there is a handwritten sign that becomes something
else while suggesting a word, which is in itself already
image and vice versa, if there is a colour that once
for its shades and another time for its tones lets
us into a dimension that, though staying as it is,
still bears the condition for becoming something else,
if all this exists, then we have to highlight a simultaneity
both on an aesthetic level as well as on a psychological
level. It is a simultaneity that corresponds to a
mirror, to the refraction of images and situations,
it is a simultaneity that corresponds to a kaleidoscope
that projects us into an iridescent game of pages
that are quiet at one point and melancholically dreamy
at some other point, dark at one point and ironic
at another.
Pages that are though always revealing, mysterious
and present.
Rome, January 1977
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Marisa Vescovo - 1978
The Sign-Symbol of Simona
Weller
After the important inventions introduced by the historical
avant-gardes, one must return to the humility of rediscovery,
reducing the emphasis and communication between the
minimal excesses of the current pictorial and situational
grammar, to think about the linguistic elements involved
and their use as construction elements. A woman artist,
in particular, feels compelled to create different
relationships with society, a way of giving order
to gesture and to materials, and to the space to be
filled.
Analysing the art system means to accept colour as
an osmotic membrane underlining the autonomy and reality
of the "whole" which, at the same time,
is composed of the object and its surface, matter
and chromatics, which occupy and integrate space,
underlining the organisational rules of basic elements;
it also means to underline the most simple linguistic
elements, in order to analyse the creation as related
to the work's system, which again should be perceived
in its twofold nature relating to nature and culture.
On the other hand, we -like Cassirer- are more and
more aware that we are surrounded by a process of
ever growing symbolisation. Our world is a universe
made of signs and symbols in which every shape, word
or gesture can be exemplified, allowing us to believe,
above and below their pathways, that they are references
to a behavioural pattern going beyond the work of
art itself. The symbol's function is to clarify the
need to understand things; it indicates a place, an
event or even a pathway, a physical space and track,
used during our daily encounters, before which we
can observe the appearance of a phenomenon of apparent
indifference or of emotional-repulsive motions.
These are the real reasons why we believe Simona Weller
is searching to uncover, with the greatest concentration
and the slightest effort, the fragments of the unexpected
stratifications of images deposited in her own deepest
being; a search whose pulsations and emotions are
conjugated with feminine suffixes, almost as if this
were to become the beginning of an affirmative discussion
and a severely highlighted dialogue in which reality
is acknowledged and rediscovery shown as if it were
emerging from a forgotten, unresolved situation in
the middle of unequal floating, volatile and contradictory
signs. There is certainly an entry or a return - we
don't know which - to a consistency of colour, memories,
and dreams caught while they develop, all through
the use of a series of symbols, of a happy and fecund
naturalness that needs no interpretation or explanation
but must just be there, to deny, again, an intimate
and personal history of silences, denial, censorship,
of absurd and alienating removal processes.
In Weller's most recent works there appears to be
a clear, pressing need to clarify the elements seen
in her previous works, in order to continue to live
and meditate about the perception of a closed situation,
so that the symbols moving across the canvasses with
small scores, underscoring, weft and weaving, continuous
and discontinuous, allow us to perceive a protracted
explosion from the preceding nucleus of her writing,
which disseminates itself and proceeds horizontally
towards the abyss of an alchemic transmutation, wherein
the viewer sees him/herself as an abbreviated vibrating,
pictorial and graphical signal. Here is a creation
somewhere between the diary-like impulse to write
(using the physiology of the symbol itself) and a
sign filled with chromatic vibrations but which, at
the same time, is never abstract or automatic; an
encounter marked by various levels of experience and
analogies.
This decisive crossroad is found at this point of
her work, on paper and on velvet. In fact, the sign
used to control space narrates, as always, a pathway,
and this sign appears to be a measurable element,
instant, elementary, obsessive yet free, an emotional,
innocent adventure as if born in infancy, yet bearing
intellectual depth and vision. It is therefore essential
to find a system in which emptiness and fullness can
be arranged. The sign/symbol adopts a mechanism using
continuous repetition, not as a finished gesture but
as a variable tensor, moving and following emotional
and rational behaviour patterns. In this way, the
perceptive means is clear and one comprehends an operation
where arrows are shot at absolute and symbolic values,
above all tones, light, and colours, above and below,
move in an optical play towards an intense and dynamic
conquest of space where one sees the gradual alignment
of a series of pins imitating the unending routines
of daily life. The repeated use of this mentally controlled
dripping is undertaken with no attention to the borders
of the surface, and the dripping moves towards them,
as if searching for a relationship between the work
and what takes place in the area beyond it. The paper
or velvet receive the simplest of signals; a dotted
line from which minimal pulsations are underlined,
together with imperceptible levels of sensitivity,
thereby producing an operation in which sign and concept
coincide and become the framework of a long descent
into the unconscious, moving into remote memories
in which hesitation and knowledge mix in a simultaneous
movement of bergsonian length, continuing in the present
and going towards the future.
The sign invades the surrounding space, confirming
its continuation through time, not just as a straight
line moving towards a central arrival point, but with
a series of movements indicating repetitions, sliding,
interruptions, always in a two dimensional state,
soft yet thick. Everything is channelled towards an
ever-changing transformation, richer, more complicated,
dilated beyond any pre-planned structure and, therefore,
far from the boring label usually given to optical
art. The points proceeding in a never-ending series,
are not part of a traced line representing pre-planned
or pragmatically imposed gestures, but they appear
to be the record of something living, moving or open
to an afterwards. The keys for breaking the code of
these messages are not given because we are dealing
with symbols/signs, a series of symptoms that refer
to something that is happening or that is being consumed
in the motion of relativity -which is the only absolute
we have left- as a possibility to be "here"
and "now".
The instinctive automation of the gesture - where
gesture is a means with intrinsic qualities of an
organic nature, tied to subconscious- belongs to a
humanistic culture whose roots developed way beneath
the Italian tradition, that moves from tones to timbres
and expresses itself in the gargoyles of a language
given back in a signal-visual form, capable of receiving
inspiration and breath from the sea, water, sunshine
and from the clear air of a country morning.
Nature, celebrated in this way, is dissected into
little pieces down to its simplest elements, in order
to recreate syntax that lies at the origin of all
semantic painting, interspersed with rhythms echoed
in those often seen on the walls of the Ravenna basilicas.
The colour impulses are always closely linked to writing,
to the signs produced, while the use of white strengthens,
like light, the neuralgic centres of the vibrating
fabric. Luminosity arrives mysteriously on the opaque
black of the background. The minute figures that appear,
measured carefully by a hand that draws and an eye
that guides, are no longer within space but become
space and represent the last frontier of the Illusionism
of Modern painting.
The point or dot therefore becomes chromatic quantity,
capable of suggesting continuity, creating the fullness
and the emptiness of a conscience; a consciousness
that is not the opposite of unconscious, but which
is capable of living with the conscious and unconscious
at the same time, reality received in a visual blow
up.
The most recent paintings by Weller are able to create
themselves within the chromatics used, in a process
that is in time capable of expressing the contradictions
of painting, its meaningful actions, its history,
which today, more than ever before, places us in front
of the pulsations rising from a profound structure.
The artist, although never overcome by her private
phantoms, has used a certain nocturnal element within
her imagination, permitting a vision of her ongoing
race towards the apex of her symbols - for example
the Sea and the Wave, a liquid element, giver of life,
therefore feminine-: both are typical of the European
habitat, wherein they are traditional linguistic elements
narrating themselves ambiguously, guided by a metaphor,
to which we owe much, not only for the persistence
of memories, but for its still unbroken and liberating
aim.
Rome, January 1978
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Elverio Maurizi - 1980
Simona Weller: Painting with
Words
"Painting with words"
is for Simona Weller not merely an aphorism, it is,
in fact, the exact explanation of how an intellectual
situation is translated into reality; it is the cross
reference to a series of backwashes which, apart from
all the possible historical precedents (for example
Apollinaire, Futurism, Dadaism) propose covert or
indirect references by means of an almost symbiotic
co-habitation of a series of words with the images
they suggest. This kind of communication appears,
therefore, to be somewhat ambiguous and provoking
because it suggests a temporary relationship between
two different dimensions - one verbal (and therefore
synthetic) and the other figurative (and therefore
analytic), in which however it is not necessarily
the linguistic structure, which prevails upon the
literary elements, involved.
Without referring to psychoanalytical myths (that
in any case are typical of so much of this period's
critical work), I believe that an analysis of this
young painter's work must be attempted by means of
a much simpler method - in other words, it is necessary
to return to the moment when "words" and
"painting" become "one" in her
imagination and where her force of perception gives
life to an original psychological germ, and transforms
this into a basis for discussion and confrontation.
One could even hypothesize that there is a direct
connection between the darkest and deepest recesses
of those half hidden ferments of the mind (memories
long forgotten or an archaic childhood) of real attempts
to rediscover a world where fantasy and reality are
one.
At the same time, a purely historical approach (which
I prefer) would appear to be indicated for a style
of painting which, while describing ordinary and metaphorical
themes, sees these quite clearly as essential emblems
of "Being".
This research automatically leads us to an analysis
of the artist's earlier investigations, that is to
say of those vaguely surreal elements that have been
constant in her work for many years and that follow
the pathway traced by Ernst-Matta-Sutherland (pathway
accurately described by Cesare Vivaldi1). In fact,
Weller's re-elaboration of data from the real world
into re-proposals by means of symbols and allusions,
through syntheses and extrapolations, remains her
unique constant, which today, too, seems to characterize
her work.
The magical significance enclosed within her spelling
of her pictorial language is the dominating factor
of her work, covering everything with a nostalgic
desire for simplicity, a desire that becomes slowly
visible not just with one's imagination but in a more
tangible way, in a way that catalyses the signs of
Nature and marks the cycle of Life. If knowledge is
the means whereby each man underlines - in a given
historical moment - the problem of existence and of
becoming, then Simona Weller, with a sympathetic method
(sympathy used in the Greek sense, i.e. concord, harmony,
or "to feel with") demonstrates how the
mediation of her traced line does not resolve, sic
et simpliciter, the need to illustrate totally
the entire significance of one's art, but rather suggests
the necessity to investigate the use and function
of significance. The artist must therefore follow
a practical and mental process in which - through
more or less obvious semantic connections - text and
imagery solicit the use of a language, which is closely
tied to the most secret recesses, and motivations
of his/her creativity.
When Federica Di Castro states that in these pictures
"words" have been transformed into "a
harmonic amalgam of rhythms, signs, signals, transcriptions,
errors, and memory", or even more simply, into
"a projection of the soul into canvas" she
is, in effect, underlining how the reference points
- orthographic or not - multiply their incidence and
are capable of highlighting the sentimental and instinctive
aspects of the work. Reflections from various cultural
influences - ranging from post-impressionistic colours3
to systematic organisation of the contents4 and to
a profound introspection5 attract the observer to
an apparently romantic atmosphere in which the intensity
of communication is conveyed by means of the subtle
and penetrating balance between colours and lines.
Various urgent problems arise when we observe the
recent production of this painter, not the least of
these is that of the use of a compositional freedom
which now appears in many aspects of her work; these
are never incoherent in the eurhythmic development
used and these aspects appear to determine the tempo
of the reading and to solicit (as if this were essential)
the pauses and reflections that arise from this. It
is sufficient to understand how the warp and weave
of her lines move, in order to understand the secret
connections between her thoughts, the grammatical
and syntactical notes, that network which forces the
primeval elements into a free-play context within
a continuum in space and time, fascinating
and provocative at the same time.
A full -and occasionally solemn- breath emerges symmetrically
with the growth and development of the colours on
the canvas, and this breath moves them in different
ways and forces them to impress a sinuous line, full
of dramatic content.
Tommaso Trini6 is quite correct when he observes how
Weller's "writing in colours" overlaps between
the "horizontal rhythms of a speckled grid"
and that this is necessary in order to exalt "the
sensitive tones of her relationship with Nature".
Nevertheless, I think it is important to point out
how the use of the "lemma", transformed
from concept into line, brings us to an harmonic destructuring
of the word, which though will continue to exist as
a loudspeaker for psychological vibrations, whose
evocative powers leave the observer with a need to
make considerations upon the multiple explicit and
implicit implications contained in Weller's works.
I do not think that Weller's chromatic pulsations
are declined in a "feminine way", as held
by Marisa Vescovo7. If, however, with this "expression"
she intended to imply a certain kind of sensitivity,
a happy gracefulness of imagination, and an individual
system of organisation that brings into the foreground
the almost musical nature of Weller's paintings, and
a similar "expression" to describe the transfer
of certain intimate thoughts into intellectual expressions,
thoughts and tensions which convey simple linguistic
units with a feminine quality, then I could agree
with the definition as such, because in this way Weller
transfers an ideological and cultural privacy onto
canvas, finalizing certain logical and iconoclastical
connotations, whose verbal-visual representations
are in fact the central core of her artistic discourse.
Ten years of painting, from 1970 to 1979, represent
a long period that, at the same time, is quite sufficient
to clarify the motivations that have guided this Roman
born artist towards a continuous refinement of the
instruments for her individual style of painting.
In Dieci Anni (Ten Years), painted in 1970,
a hypothetical free space is left to develop in much
the same way as a school copybook would, and is rich
with transitional densities that change according
to the unchangeable rules of a primordial systematic
reasoning.
In Ciao, burattino (Hi, puppet) of 1971, the
structure would appear to support a phoneme that is
only slightly reinforced by a characterisation of
the design that underlines the difference between
reading and seeing.
In Con la parola erba (With the word grass)
of 1972, thanks to a rhythmic superimposition of a
series of letters, the writing space opens up a large
figurative area, whose breadth clamours for visual
independence. Again, in Tessitura per la parola
erba (Weaving with the word grass) distinctive
tracts would appear to be necessary in order to underline
the subordinate personality of the written word in
relation to the "de-semantication" of words.
Here, the progressively mutual inter-relationships
of the linguistic and the pictorial codes become complementary
to each other within the central theme of intellectual
contents. In canvasses such as Un campo di grano
con volo di corvi (A wheat field with flying crows)
the graphics used would appear to be all absorbing
were it not for the fact that the words are almost
completely disarticulated and from this "decompositional"
style a process of communication is born. The same
phenomenon is found in other works of this period,
and the following years, where the linguistic space,
(apparently overtaken by the disappearance of the
words) would still appear to be the essential structure.
This structure is created with the use of paint-smudges,
and the rhythm between these facilitates the vision
of a multitude of chromatic tones and of the disintegration
of colour to create meaningful refrains whose meaning
would otherwise stay hidden.
Tessere un mare viola (To weave a Violet Sea)
transforms the text into real graphic warps and weaves
and demonstrates that the technique used to "decompose"
is as important as the composition of the writing
itself.
This present analysis would be incomplete without
an observation on the developments discovered in later
works. Of particular interest is Parole controluce
(Words against the light) a mixed technique in collage
and tempera on paper (1979), and part of the even
larger work Diario al muro (Diary on the wall)
in which certain almost plastic elements are involved.
Un colore per ogni ora (A colour for every
Hour), also from 1979, uses pigment as a graphic element,
in imitation of language that goes beyond conventionality
in the use of line and sign and is a rather conceptual
research carried to extremes, whose and echoes are
also found in Quando in Primavera (When in
Spring) or in the two pastel and tempera works (also
from 1979) Vento nell'erba (Wind in the Grass)
and Fuoco nell'erba (Fire in the Grass).
The most interesting discoveries are to be found in
the artists most recent work; for example in L'abolizione
della realtà (Abolition of Reality) because
of the pleasant interchange of artistic enunciations
and of the nostalgic quality assumed by the painting,
a reality that forces the observer to think about
the physical nature of intention which has developed
from the original reality of a mental process.
In describing her recent research in a recent letter8,
Simona Weller talks of the "return of figurative
elements", of "readable letters alternated
with undeciphered words", of "threads of
images that grow into words", and of "words
that change into threads of imagination", of
"a sort of coded cipher of the unconscious mind",
whose archetypes are attracted by "great paintings"
and by "great poetry". It is not easy to
decipher the ambiguity hidden in these works, but
it would appear legitimate to ask ourselves if any
critical knowledge could define the limits of any
system, reducing creativity to a mere longing for
things of the past, to suggestions for how one could
read, to the necessary interpretation of a poetry
which goes beyond simple appearance, to observe and
understand not only the architectonic or compositional
values but, above all, an the musical and pictorial
possibilities.
Roland Barthes10 writes that "an image on its
own does not by itself invent imagination, but imagination
cannot be described without that image, even if it's
a small and lonely image".
In her extrapolations, Simona Weller uses a grammar
made up of elementary signs and colours, which gives
the due support to an eloquent and see-through way
of communicating, whose ductility brings to life the
formality required in a painting and, even more than
that, shows us a personal style of writing that seems
to bridge the gap between painting and literature.
As Oscar Wilde observed in the preface to The Portrait
of Dorian Gray the chosen are those "to whom
beautiful things mean only beauty".
For those of us who, like you and me, were born in
more tragic times, these "beautiful things"
have assumed an existential importance, a final, extreme
vision of the "art-life" principle, - i.e.
a fact that binds together illusion and reality. Instead,
for the young Roman painter, "these things"
are a luminous affirmation, a liberating analysis,
a personal contribution to life in this society.
Macerata, May 1980
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Bruno Lorenzelli
- 1981
Conversing with Simona Weller
B.L. - As a born and bred Roman artist, how do
you explain the fact that most of Italian critical
writing is centred on Rome?
S.W. - That is a question I have often been asked
in Milan, and with malice aforethought I think. The
people who ask the question may know the answer already
and they may be looking for confirmation of their
love-hate feelings about Rome. The idea that needs
confirmation is that we are all dissatisfied with
the behaviour of the critical establishment, and we
are all dissatisfied whit the political establishment.
And since the political and the critical establishments
both live and work in the same city, there must be
some connection between the two. Of course there is,
it is obvious, but some people may like to hear it
again. A well-known politician remarked that "power
wears down those who don't have it", and that
might serve as the motto of the Roman critics. Everything
Milan thinks about Rome is true. It is true that Rome
is corrupt, that culture is run by under-secretaries,
that there is greed and historical short-sightedness.
It is true that the critics are bureaucrats, careerists,
and paranoids. Lea Vergine said that "in Rome
gossip becomes scandal", and I think she is right.
B.L. - How do you explain the "love"
that this "whorish" city evokes?
S.W. - I think it is latent in everyone who lives
"outside" Rome, and it may have ancient
roots in a collective unconscious that includes both
the Roman Empire and the caricature of that empire
created by Fascism. And then, this damned city is
damned beautiful, full of colour, imagination, joie
de vivre, people of every race... you see... every
sort of thing happens here, every day, it's as if
we were always in a state of shock. But those vivid
green Mediterranean pines outlined against a fine
cloudless sky... they're not just "what I see
from my studio window"; they're a consoling image
of a visual culture that I am part of... After Balla,
after Severini, after Boccioni, after Mafai and Raphaël,
after Caporossi, Dorazio and Accardi… Why don't
you ask me why even De Chirico came back to Rome to
die?
B.L. - If this city is so seductive after all,
why are you Roman artists so worried about the success
of the younger generation of painters? Can they "lay
on the paint" better than you do?
S.W. - If they knew how to "lay on the paint"
better, as you put it, then I think we would clench
our teeth and humbly watch them take their places
in the arena… But to go back to the short-sightedness
of the critics in Rome, which is where it all starts,
they take over the media as if they were launching
a new brand of soap; there hasn't been anything like
it in the past twenty years. The trouble is that they
are inflating personalities that don't have enough
breath to climb the stairs home… Do you remember
the fashion for being "political"? The same
that happened in public schools in 1968, (with prizes
going for mediocrity, crudeness, and lack of ability)
is now happening to the art world too… But there
is a substantial difference. While indiscriminate
acculturation was "political", the recruiting
of mediocre artists to create a "new situation"
seems like a plague. Once again it is the "monsters"
that make the news.
B.L. - If the atmosphere in Rome is degraded, if
there is no market for art, and if intelligent and
attentive criticism is lacking, how can artists live
there, and how can they work?
S.W. - Sometimes I think we're either giants or masochists.
Even though the Rome National Gallery of Modern Art
does not have any important De Chirico or any important
Futurist paintings, there are many in New York and
many people go to look at them. And I think that these
midgets who are trying to pass off their grotesque
impotence (like vaudeville comics) as serious, creative
artistic work will get their just deserts from history
(although museums teach us that no trace of them will
remain). They will get what they deserve, like all
the nameless "turds" who have always pretended
they never knew who was living just upstairs…
and it might have been Balla.
B.L. - And you?
S.W. - You may laugh, but I reserve the right to paint
well, to be free to explore beauty as much as I like,
without accusing fingers pointed at me, the way they
do in Italy.
Milan, March 1981
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Enrico Cocuccioni
- 1983
Conversing with Simona Weller
E.C. - It seems to me that your present work represents
a moment of synthesis and survey. Maybe we are getting
close to a turning-point…
S.W. - Yes, right now I am actually using all my symbols.
"Mine", because I take them from my unconscious,
from my experiences, from my culture. This exhibition
is called "A sign is the specimen spoken",
from a phrase by Gertrude Stein, writer and theorist
of cubism. Other sentences of hers also inspired the
paintings' titles. These sentences seem evocative,
magical, perfect for that I want to paint: "called,
each thing shivers a bit…".
E.C. - Do you agree about the turning-point part?
S.W. - Certainly, I am conscious that "I sought,
and now I have found" and I like it that
you mentioned synthesis. I feel that my work, which
is so dense and rich with quotations, is like a river
(just like a painting, just like life) in which I
have learned to swim. But, as Picasso used to say,
I consider painting as a self-therapy; so I would
say that I do it especially for myself. Of course,
it can also help others by releasing particular echoes
or identification possibilities; and this obviously
makes me happy. Just like a writer is happy to touch
the reader's sensitivity, it excites me to add an
eye to another person's sensitivity.
E.C. - Do you think you have reached a creative
maturity?
S.W. - I hope so; I believe that a painter's maturity
is revealed when his/her control of the human and
pictorial mediums becomes one with "creation"
(which does not have anything to do with the more
general term "creativity").
E.C. - So you believe there is a difference between
creativity and creation?
S.W. - Perhaps they are just as different as the critic
and the artist... Anyone who uses imagination and
talent, intuition and curiosity to enrich his/her
life and to love his/her work can be considered creative.
The creation process is instead a very, very long
and patient search, similar to scientific research,
which can proceed by steps, revolutions, inventions,
but which only becomes "useful" if it manages
to make an apparently dried up branch blossom again,
or if it generates a new tree from a little scion.
And by tree, I metaphorically mean the great oak named
Art, which survives since centuries.
E.C. - Is it then possible to find a critical criterion
to diversify expression in general from art in particular?
S.W. - We could probably come very close to this if
we tried to identify the various phases of the very
delicate process that leads to creation. For instance,
think of how natural it is to consider inspiration
the process's first phase! I agree with Severini who
says that "we must be ready, in order to receive
inspiration!". Behind inspiration lies a
clot of data, facts, information, a decantation of
emotions which only spring out at a certain moment.
And this moment is already a second phase, while a
third phase could be that imponderable gear which,
maybe for an association of ideas, makes you predict
the exact result in the composition of a work (which
in fact could never be any different from what it
is...). A fourth phase certainly concerns the courage
-or the need- to compare the work with the outside
world, in order to expose the results to others...
And we can even point out a fifth phase, which concerns
the sphere of feelings; because we need a firmness,
a tenaciousness, a strength that are not common, to
believe in our work in spite of the trends, of the
cultural terrorism, of the obedience to the power
and (let's say it, at least once!) despite the fact
of being a woman.
E.C. - Speaking of trends, today we can observe
a triumph of a sort of "painting pornography";
what is your opinion about this pressing overlapping
of the Image over a less gaudy horizontal dimension,
which is though more critical and constructive?
S.W. - I think that the artistic event can contain
various coexisting factors, even though we continuously
witness a sectarian separatist attitude -be it because
of commercial strategies or due to political events-
which certainly does not favour a fertile circulation
of ideas. However, even the most different tendencies
have often gone along parallel lines. Also, history
has demonstrated that conformists have often auto-sponged
themselves out, while the more original personalities
have managed to prove themselves right; and not even
with so much delay... Abnormal phenomena like the
one you called Pornography of Image are the logical
consequence of the abuse of "trends and fashion".
No one has yet had the courage to say that yawning
can lead to jaw dislocation, therefore, for the moment,
we can just keep the monsters we deserve....
*******
S.W. - Why do you think that
my work contains an optimistic and positive component
"in spite of all"?
E.C. - Firstly, I still feel that your work contains
a constructive effort, a structural tension that,
at least partly, is aligned to the operational line
of modern art, whose linguistic models and experimental
aesthetics seem today to be going through a crisis.
You yourself evoked the crisis of project and of
ideology, when you spoke about a phase that is no
more based on "research" but which instead
expressly refers to Picasso's "I don't seek,
I find" concept. Furthermore, because the idea
of "self-therapy" allows you to find a
new centre, to reach a synthesis, to self-motivate
the work… "in spite of all" - i.e.
despite the despairing problems concerning the relationship
between the artist and society. That, fortunately
still allows you to create and confine a living-space,
which is certainly not a conflict-free place for
escapisms; it is a space where it's always possible
to find the anchorage points of a positive attitude.
S.W. - In light of your research on my work, do
you think there is a reaction to that "painting
pornography" we talked about earlier?
E.C. - E.C. - I think so. More than a reaction,
I'd say that I can sense a need to make room for
a different equilibrium -certainly not a precarious,
illusory or ordinary equilibrium but rather, perhaps,
a more complicated balance than those which are
today going through the crisis- between th | | | |
