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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 the expressive
immediateness and intellectual mediation, between
the pathos of gesture and the breath of more "stable"
forms and, more in general, between memory, imagination
and every day reality.
S.W. - Today, the critic aims at avoiding the obstacle
of expressing explicit opinions. But don't you think
that -if there must be a dialogue between artists
and critic-, the critics should also expose themselves?
E.C. - Certainly, but we must make a distinction
between the critic's evasion - a common diplomatic
expedient- and the authentic necessity to express
articulated and complicated opinions. Dialogue requires
careful listening and a reciprocal breadth of views.
It seems clear to me that there already is a dialogue
between us. I am not just saying this because I
respect my job: the relationship between a critic
and an artist also involves mutual intellectual
respect, human attraction and even a bit of "experience".
And I think that all these factors are all tightly
correlated. A correlation which, in this case, is
particularly fertile and rich with meanings. I'd
say that it is mainly the critic who grows rich
and who gets the most profit and pleasure from dialogue
with the work of the artist. In my opinion, your
work's pathway doesn't suggest a simple explanation,
a straight line. It does not follow a formula, an
explicit method, a premeditated and servile coherence.
However, I find it very consistent. This questions
the ideological myth of research, of the project,
of mechanical linguistic evolutionism. But this
also confers a certain relativity to those theoretical
models which explain everything in terms of rupture,
of a mere caesura or catastrophe. And what if the
latter were really the path that art is about to
take?
Rome, April 1983
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Barbara Tosi - 1983
A Sign is the Spoken Exemplar
The artist's universe is always a place of infinite
and moving presences. In the same way, Simona Weller's
universe is populated of art's memories, of literature,
of characters, of paintings and images.
If on the one hand this articulate and vivid world
leaves an indelible sign of its passing, on the other
hand it is thwarted by the artist's creativity which
absorbs it in favour of a unique and original production.
In Weller's works, we can recognize the same elements
found in Braque's world, such as "waltz",
patches of material, hand painted mimetic wallpaper.
These elements are more than just a memory; they are
a real and true statement, witnessing the artist's
cultural and visual background. Recalling historical
parts of images in the pictures - without influencing
the work in its original spirit- only becomes possible
when the work is already firmly developed.
Apprenticeship of experience is the road taken by
the artist to reach her aim and to immediately abandon
it once she has fulfilled it. In this dense pathway
of discoveries, of sudden turn-backs designed to quickly
step forward in the path to her ideal canvas -which
stretches and unrolls, pressed by the paint-brush's
coups- the images compose the logical thread of her
own process.
The hedged unintelligible, lonely words have lived
in Simona Weller's pictures for a long time, until
they began stretching and loosening up to lose their
actual shape and to be reduced to the essentiality
of a secret writing made of signs and colours.
While the artist writes things that only rarely become
words, her pictorial translation is refined and light,
not devoid of a polite irony. It is here that "A
sign is the specimen spoken". Words now come
out, all together, in a paradoxically mute shouting;
these words with no voice then become colour and dart
through every corner of the picture.
The title of the pictures plays gaily and ironically
and if, on one hand, they are the effect of the Gertrude
Stein's able pen, on the other hand they are the result
of Simona Weller's wise harvest.
So the "Ode to a lady's eyebrows"
("Ode alle ciglia di una signora")
acts as a counterpoint and confirmation to the idea
that "A place is not a new table"
("Un posto non è un tavolo nuovo"),
while everybody knows that "A piece of coffee
doesn't make you lose time" ("Un
pezzo di caffè non fa perdere tempo"),
while we can state, not without a certain circumspection,
that "In a white belt all the shadows are
unique" ("In una cintura Bianca tutte
le ombre sono singolari"); and all this leaves
space both for educational works "How painting
is written" ("Come è scritta
la pittura") and to the wise options "Choose
large soles and small quarrels" ("Scegli
suole grandi e pochi litigi"), etc...
Quite a serious game, which slightly deposits to confirm
the uncountable possibilities of ineffable female
qualities. Although a distinction between female art
or male art doesn't exist, what does exist are the
distinct qualities of the feminine and the masculine
sides, which come out of the paintings regardless
of the artist's actual gender.
Like a projection of the most secret intimacy, in
their shapes and in their colours the pictures reveal
much more than that they actually show: a new soul,
which belongs to them only, and the effect of the
interlacing of very diverse elements.
In the sometimes chaotic (but always intense) feminine
storytelling of the last ten years, words piled up
one over another until this brought to silence; at
the same time, thought continuously fermented. In
the same way, Simona Weller's pictorial speech materializes,
condenses on the picture as natural chromatic pastes
and shapes, which come out of a wise and conscious
paint-brush.
In the acute and prehensile flowing of glance, every
informed eye will be able, in this exhibition, to
catch a glimpse of the artist's painting-path.
Rome, January 1983
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Palma Bucarelli -
1984
The World Through Simona Weller's
Sensitivity
Writing is Simona Weller's starting point, but the
composition is not developed in the usual manner.
The words crumble and come apart, they turn into commas,
waves and strokes, often forming stratifications.
The words lose their original meaning while taking
on a new one, a purely visual meaning which leads
to an almost visual type of poetry; they interweave,
yet never going back to the previous meaning but leaning
towards another, almost geometric kind of organization.
For a certain period, Weller approaches Cubism and
a certain kind of purism, in search for the "golden
section". For another period, she gets involved
post in Impressionism, painting a series of pictures
inspired by Seurat's Grande Jatte, though using
a flat and fragmented image. While the things depicted
maintain a trace of naturalism, they are flattened
out as if on a written page. There are some slightly
ironic and scenographic themes which recall Severini,
though they are constantly broken up and fragmented
in order to provide an explanation for their being
part of this internal structure. There are many reminiscences,
a deposit of memories and experiences of life and
culture and a constant outpouring of images. Sometimes
luminous and sometimes opaque, the images approach
one another, they intersect, and overlap one over
the other, in search of a compositional structure
that almost always settles down logically and plausibly
in the end. And all of this is filtered by intelligence
and erudition complementing each other but never too
openly losing concentration. Ultimately, it is the
artist's sense, or rather her sensitivity, masked
by an intellectual finesse, that is unmistakably displayed
to a greater or less extent.
If we try to analyze or separate a detail, it may
look like a troubled sea with tiny foaming waves,
or it might be part of a face or a mask or a stylized
animal, or a house. But when we look at it as a whole,
we can find logical connections between these details,
whose background is always the written language, word.
Thus the images, too, become fragments of things and
fragments of words that stand for those very things.
Simona takes her own world of long-pondered images
and collects and selects those that emerge and seem
to express her thoughts best. It is just so many images
and nothing more that she puts on her canvas to compose
a balanced whole, which is what gives that sense of
completeness to the picture. There is never anything
superfluous, however packed the painting may look,
nor is there anything less than what is necessary.
The paintings that are closest to the cubist image
contain typical elements of that school, but they
also have elements created by the artist. There are
collages made of fragments of music paper, wallpaper,
bits of banisters, lines, and broken and intersecting
geometrical forms. But the artist rejects Cubism's
fourth dimension and, sometimes, even its third dimension.
Everything is flattened, like on a written page, and
this is always the ultimate aim of Simona Weller's
intent. In an interview she gave some time ago, she
spoke of inspiration. To borrow a phrase by Severini,
to whom she seems to be related by way of Braque,
"you have to be ready to receive". Yet,
I don't think one can speak of inspiration in Weller's
case. It is just that the things she has seen and
experienced, the cultural baggage she has accumulated
and the facts of life are filtered through her special
way of interpreting things; they accumulate over a
period of time, and then the moment comes when the
artist feels impelled to put them on canvas. This
is the magic moment that many people refer to as inspiration.
But I know artists who never feel this experience.
They sit at their easels in the morning and work all
day like good craftsmen at their trade. Which doesn't
mean that they can't do excellent work, even without
inspiration!
The world, as filtered through Simona Weller's sensitivity,
is composed of an infinite number of motifs, just
like the real world we live in. The images are countless
and constantly shifting while they are ultimately
interchangeable as well. This has nothing to do with
the unconscious, as Simona Weller remarked in the
interview mentioned above. There is nothing in her
painting that is not controlled or sifted by thought.
Nor is it a matter of automatic writing or visual
poetry: words are so shattered in her pictures, that
they take on a totally different meaning. The artist
admits to include quotations in her painting, but
they are so mixed with dismembered fleeting words
that they acquire a whole new meaning and presence.
Simona Weller has a strong sense of image structure,
which is why everything that looks unstable and fluctuating
unfailingly ends up coming together in a solid, precise,
concise whole that leaves no space to chance, taking
up the form of a finished and even rigorously "closed"
picture. The conflicts that take place in the artist's
spirit, and in her world made of cultural forms, are
ultimately resolved in a single "whole",
albeit a "whole" imposed by the artist's
will, which though gives the observer every chance
for personal digression and interpretation.
Sometimes, her painting softens up and becomes more
human, so to speak. Her writing is then just confined
to a brief portion of space at the top, almost resembling
a signature; the written word becomes more like painting,
and the objects - lemons, a basket, piano keys and
a book (for the ambiguity that marks Weller's painting)-
are meant to be more transparent according to post
Impressionist tradition, almost reminiscent of a Bonnard
or a Vuillard, so to speak, as in the picture Lemons,
Basket, and a Quiver... (the quivers in Simona
Weller are few and far between).
Another interesting thing worth mentioning in this
artist is that there is no apparent or explicit development.
She has set out her world of images, and she never
strays, though she may vary it. This reflects her
profound belief, and this by itself justifies her
vocation as an artist and her rare integrity in keeping
faith with her inner life and with her life as an
artist.
Calcata, March 1984
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Paola Levi Montalcini
- 1985
The "Invented" Works
by Simona Weller
If is true, as has been written, that there is a delicate
relationship between the lines of the horizon and
the melodic lines of folk songs, such as to render
almost linear and without variation the songs of seaside
towns; while the variations of the low and higher
regions represent the songs of the hill regions, and
the melodic line is completely transformed in the
high mountains, by means of pauses and the alternation
of deep low notes and disturbing high ones, as if
to become closely identified with the high rocky profiles
of the projecting peaks hewn out against the clear
sky; there is a suggestion of a parallel between the
world of poetry and that of a visual language. The
last work "constructed" by Simona Weller
appears to offer the key to her too exposed language
so as not to hide the intense "veiled" content.
It is that of a strong personality, significant in
effect, synthesis and poetry, the clarity of a panorama
expressed through an almost unchanging continuity
on the level of "writing" and extremely
varied through the "melodic" range of solar
and lunar colours. The horizon of the last work to
which I refer is traversed for the entire length proposed
by the painter by a horizontal line-plane that is
not expressed geometrically and is such as to communicate
a series of disturbing motifs and contents. One knows
that the horizontal line is the line of death. But
on the level of visual language that line may also
be the division distinguishing the earth from the
sky, it may suggest all the possible variations of
an endless range of alternatives. Simonapast has been
a continual concealment in an ambiguity of a mental,
highly pictorial countryside for which only one other
name comes to mind - that of a great artist: Seurat.
Roma, July 1985
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Nanda Vigo - 1985
Dressing the Word with Material
Painting
…speaking of your work and simplifying the analectic
processes of surreal and mnemonic phases. We have
known each other since the seventies, with a long
friendship begun in Calice, punctuated by your stay
at Finalborgo and by the exhibitions at Punto's and
Rotelli's. The first works were interwoven with childlike
handwriting and from its casualness and your "following
the lines", rather than the carrying out of a
literary language. It seems to me that precisely this
"following the lines" within other meanings
has encouraged you to use the written sign as a weft
or warp to "write" your paintings, and these
are the works that interest me most, even though,
in that period, this kind of painting seemed strange
while the rest of us were re-working well known materials,
and objects and not on a square surface. Today I look
at your pictorial insistence with greater pleasure;
certainly not because your works have been revalued
by the shrewd censors of analects, but because your
work demonstrates that creating a picture - today
- doesn't necessarily mean that one must seek for
inspiration in techniques unknown in every avant-garde
from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, and
that you can exclude anything which is emblematic,
comforting, securely extrovert, "POST".
I remember how, in 1972, you came with Cesare Vivaldi
to my wedding as witnesses (you wore an enormous special
wedding hat) and how we talked at length of the social
problem of the non-admission of women's work to the
world of the visual arts, thus in 1976 you succeeded
in putting together (I mean you tirelessly collected
and edited) all this information. "Il complesso
di Michelangelo" (The Michelangelo Complex),
with which I disagreed only about the title. Because,
for Goodness' sake, to create art is not a complex,
but a necessity that should not make distinctions
between the sexes. Even if, certainly, a woman may
have a family complex, an organisation to which she
has been bound by age-old traditions. All of this,
however, has not prevented you from painting good
pictures and I trust you will continue in the future,
going well beyond the retrograde habits imposed upon
us by the delirious imprisonment of habit; rather,
you should try to embrace the poetry that the sensitivity
of your BEING can exalt but never debase! Greetings
Simona, and every best wish for your work.
Milan, July 1985
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Lorenza Trucchi - 1988
The Ever Changing Light-Color
Extension of the Sea
Since more than a century ago, the theory of Surface
has taken over the idea of Perspective; but it is
only beginning with Seurat, and even more so with
Cézanne, that this theory has evolved into
the concept of a continuous open space to be described
by means of a particular painting technique, or through
straightforward communication. This concept of immediate
participation, that transforms space into an echo
of time itself, has been brought forward by Giacomo
Balla.
It was in 1912, in Düsseldorf, where he had gone
to decorate a house for his friends (the Lowensteins)
that Giacomo Balla began his "irridescent compenetration",
based on a series of chromatic triangular shaped implants.
These abstract works, which for the painter represented
- above all - a study on the fractioning of light,
(meant as energy in movement), are precocious examples
of serial art. An art, serial in design, gesture and
image, that anticipated the chromatic textures, adopted
to a great extent by today's artists.
In Simona Weller's recent works, the influence of
the great futurist painter is clearly evident.
In his compenetration, Balla had studied the
reflections of light on the surface of a lake and,
in her own way, Simona Weller has chosen, as an inspirational
motive, the myriad reflections of light and colour
on the sea - to the point where she has made it an
allegory of her own art; I think - she has
written - of my painting pictures, one after another,
as a wave that is pushed by the wind to form and reform
itself. The sea remains where it is, like art, like
painting, always prepared for change, but at the same
time unchanging.
Weller began her non-figurative experience with painting-writing.
Among her most important inspirational words are sea,
grass, wheat. Words whose meaning is linked to the
idea of an ever constant dimension yet ever changing
space. Writing, for Simona, meant doing, creating
and, in its repetitiveness, it had assumed a ritual
meaning, embracing on intensely desired and beloved
Nature; then, little by little, the graphic lines
were neutralized by closed and even smudges and, from
1985 onwards, they were cancelled by small flashes
of pure colour.
These new, enthralling emotions and textures -described
by Weller in a series of rhythmical cadences creating
underlying depths of feeling- propose their lyrical
messages through impulsive dazzling, arresting colours
which are clearly defined, reminding us of the eternal
glories of the Mediterranean sun.
Rome, March 1988
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Antonella Anedda - 1989
The Waves' Maker
A minute figure with aqua eyes: Simona Weller has
a fragile grace. But nothing in her expression, in
her gestures, or in her kind voice ever suggests weakness.
What she says, speaking of herself, is clear and reticent
at the same time, half way between the temptation
of memory and the necessity of running away from it.
The small studio in Trastevere (Rome) where we meet
for the first time, "doesn't contain anything
that is mine", she immediately states. Her
first remarks about her own art sound like a prelude
of what will find its accomplishment days later in
Calcata. There, we will stand in front of a huge lake
painting, made with small translucent aquatic tesserae,
perfect in a room flooded with the green light of
the surrounding hills.
Travels, nature, maternity, writing - these are the
main coordinates of Simona Weller's life and art.
"I started traveling when I was very young",
she says, "in far away countries like Thailand,
when it wasn't fashionable yet. All of a sudden, I
went from the quiet and protected college life to
the adventure of open, uncomfortable, even dangerous
places. I still remember the ship leaving Naples,
bound for unknown waters".
The journey and the separation validate her vocation
as a painter. Being free and not having to suffer
the judgments (and the influence) of teachers and
colleagues allowed Simona Weller to "retrace"
what she had learned from books in the actual world,
such as, for example, a deeper understanding, mind
and soul, Gaugin...
"I used to paint frantically during the journey,
taking notes and trying to capture what I saw and
felt".
By listening to her, we realize how significant this
experience must have been for a nineteen year old
woman, wanting to "test herself" elsewhere,
as a foreigner in a foreign country. "Those
were very important years and, in order to understand
my future developments one must understand the importance
of those times. Many of my current themes had their
origin in those years. The shapes with which I work,
developed in those spaces as well".
These statements are enforced by the pictures of the
"Cycle of the Sea": foam, nocturnal waves
and a kind of blue that doesn't evoke ice, evoking
instead the warmth of oriental waters. We catch the
gesture, ample and slow. We get a proof of the importance
of the thickness of thought in this type of art, which
is nearly a stratification of the idea on canvas,
as stated by Palma Bucarelli.
Early youth has therefore been the basis, the plane
on which Simona has erected her real and metaphorical
"homes". There have been the weddings and
the children, the Umbrian country house where she
painted for years, dedicating her days to her pictures
and to her kids. There has been another important
journey in Egypt, where she discovered the desert,
the silence of colour-non-colour, the importance and
the beauty of writing, of sign on canvas.
Life and art aren't incompatible then?
"No, they aren't. I think my work proves it.
Everything I have experienced is there, where I painted.
The enriching, beautiful, but -for a while- painful
experience of maternity is deep rooted in my blackboards,
in the chalks and childish sentences. The time spent
in the country has given me the possibility to physically
feel the earth, the growth of the plants, the alternating
seasons". Simona's words "transform"
concretely into the works she shows me. Looking at
the works hanging on her walls, I understand her love
for Seurat's technique, her fervent relationship with
the air's vibrations. In a big painting of 1974 -
long purple waves emerging from a dark net - I experience
what she said (and wrote) on the intensity of her
relationship with the sea. The title of a 1985 exhibition
quotes a line from a poem by Dylan Thomas: "No
wave can comb the sea". "It is a
fragment", writes Simona, "that has
been poking my soul for months". In the words
of the text and in the shapes of the pictures, the
sea becomes a metaphor for a never appeased painting
in a permanent and inexhaustible transformation.
Those who know Dylan Thomas will remember his declaration:
"I let an image grow emotionally within myself
and (...) then I let it generate another one,
that will contradict the first".
This same dialectical freedom, the conscious, declared
swinging between substance and concept, are the leading
elements of Simona Weller's world.
If no wave can comb the sea, no picture can "comb",
can order and define painting.
Art is a sea that swallows and gives back, that creates
and destroys.
"I think that my painting one picture after
another, is like a wave that forms and re-forms itself,
driven by the wind", she says.
Waves are therefore the authentic and in some way
unique "figures" of this pictorial and poetic
universe.
No wonder then, if the name Weller means "wave-maker"
in German and if waves, as in one of Handke's characters,
identify with the core of her research.
Rome, September 1989
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Mario Ursino - 1991
The Restless Painting of Simona
Weller
"If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; A wave to
pant beneath thy power…"
Ode to the West Wind P.B. Shelley
The unique fusion of aesthetic and metaphorical
values characterizing Simona Weller's work reveals
itself throughout her entire remarkable production,
stratified though long years of researching.
There is always an impulse (a push, a wave, as her
name suggests: Weller means wave-maker) beyond the
composition and the constructive order of her pictures.
These gradually form and define themselves when that
existential emotion is appeased by the use of colours
and materials inside and outside the canvas, through
and around the frame. Every piece of work is therefore
a fragment of this existence, a metaphor of life,
meant as correspondence between nature and art.
The tendency towards a type of painting expresses
itself as an emotional movement, as a continuous impulse
coming from one's deepest being; this can be seen
since the artist's very first works, which date back
to the mid-sixties and which are inspired by a strongly
metamorphic surrealism which recalls the Max Ernst
of the Forties. A surrealism encouraged by the continuous
and fluctuating sign, that we find in other surrealists
of the same period -such as Bellmer of Tanguy- and
a also a very automatic one, according to Masson's
and Miro's lessons. This graphic sign, powerful, coloured,
luminous, will soon transform into the painting-writing
of the Seventies; a dense wave-like writing that already
contains the large canvases of the future. A sign-writing
that will characterize her mature and very personal
style, until the most recent works. The sign-writing,
the word as colour, tache, the filled canvas, constitute
the artist's method to formulate a poetic diary through
images that sum up the daily experience. A memory,
a game with a cultural filter (never too heavy) provided
by the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde movements:
from Mondrian to Klee to Cy Twombly (see I due
fratelli nell'estate del 1969).
In the subsequent works, the writing is overwhelmed
by colour: strong post-impressionist influences (especially
Seurat) will induce Simona Weller to fill the canvas
with layers and bands of colour of different luminosities,
so that the architecture of the pictures is defined
by different degrees of light, still maintaining the
written pattern, continuous from left to right (see
Vibrazione viola sulla parola mare or Vibrazione
rosa sulla parola alba, where the leit-motiv,
the word, is so absorbed by the colour-sign that it
is almost unrecognizable at first glance, and the
feeling of this evocation-repetition comes true in
the totality of the pictorial and metaphorical field).
It is "a subtle game" as Marisa Volpi Orlandini
has acutely observed " between the title, revealing
her semantics in a literary sense, and a type of painting
physically alluding to nature, at which the artist
seems to hurl herself with all her passion".
A vital jump, I would say, in a Bergsonian sense of
the word, a force of a first solar impression, that
the artist draws from the instinctive relationship
between the idea of the sea and a concrete pictorial
formalism.
That's why the word gradually disappears and the graphic
sign that it had contained survives only as movement
(wave). The colour, which is allusive, psychological,
repetitive, existential, becomes a being into painting,
as in Capogrossi, Accardi, Sanfilippo, Dorazio (see
Controluce di parole).
But The continuum of Simona Weller feeds itself
with further composing elements inferred with the
great vivacity of the cubist and metaphysical themes
which surface in her canvases. One could say, brought
about by the wave of abstract formal colour associations
restored by time and personal memories. In her inexhaustible
research, the influence of futuristic dynamism - and
in particular that of the abstract Balla - never seems
absent.
The flying flashing forms of a painting of the great
futurist master, Insidie di guerra (1915) become
the creative modules of her most recent works, many
of which are enriched by the use of thicker materials
(overlapping of cardboard, cloth, glue, skilfully
treated paper that is dried in the open air, in the
summer heat of the countryside).
Simona Weller is so immersed in painting, and in the
idea of renewing painting, that it's not possible
to find a formula for her, a definition that will
contain her overflowing and disturbed (but not disturbing)
activity. Very recent works such as Mare-Amaro,
Il segno barocco del fuoco (1990) testify, with
their formal and emotional impact, a type of art that
keeps expanding the traditional borders of perception,
while reflecting the movements of the artist's soul.
Rome, October 1991
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Angelo Capasso - 1995
Shipwrecked with Spectator
Waves, sea, wind; Simon Weller's cosmos can be reduced
to two elements. Weller's work suggests a disequilibrium
manifested in cracks, fissures and holes, which presage
a progressive crash (pulverization) about to reach
its apex. The current phase of the artist, after the
elaboration of her early 1980s experiments on Cubism,
Automatism and pointillism, has finally reached
the total dissolution of the sign in favor of concrete
matter. Her last "Happy Shipwrecks" exhibit
distant echoes of those early studies retraceable
only on paper's margins and on canvases, torn and
pulled up, gathered in the new compositions on fragile
wooden architectures. Simona Weller moves away from
painting and follows her instinct to carve lines and
create waves - waves which are even evoked in her
pseudonym (Weller in German is a form of citation
derived from wellen, which means to undulate)
and scattered in space as residues of her mental shipwrecks.
The first signs of the most recent developments appear
already in the research that the artist elaborated
in the mid 80s through her writing exercises. The
written word in those works is never a mere sign,
a graphic form. Incised on the border like a pointed
knife, the line of every word from Weller's iconographic
glossary - where terms such Sea (mare), dawn (alba),
ocean (oceano) are recurrent - disappear in its very
silhouette as if absorbed by shadow.
The work is about a study on the border-contour, which
retains the polysemic nature of the word as sign and
significance, sound and sense. Then, more distant
echoes appear, echoes which do not originate directly
from painting, but from literature. The un-violable
white candor of Mallarmé, the emptiness and
silence of T. S. Eliot, "the waves" of memory
of Virginia Woolf (to which Mario Praz refers as to
an example of literary pointillism). The literary
overflow, witnessed by the continuous reference to
the shipwreck tradition of Ungaretti and Dylan Thomas,
allows a certain verticality and self-absorption in
language and consciousness which appear in the unexpected,
in possible and fascinating Freudian interpretations.
Sea (mare) in psychoanalysis magma is the reflective
mirror for mother (madre) as a reality in its metaphoric
version - the parallel is even more evident in the
French terms mer, mère. Weller's
artistic universe depicts the peculiarity of a dialogue
between creation and generation, art and nature.
In the exhibition organized at the Granarone in Calcata
this large cosmos in continuous transformation is
visible in all its clarity. The shipwreck is abandonment,
a defeat by nature and chaos. In common language,
this might have moral connotations - "a Season
in Hell" in which one is in search for the art's
malignant spirit, the threshold between life and death.
"Death by Water" writes Eliot. Otherwise
it is regeneration. Yet regeneration not in the sense
of reconstructing a perfectly harmonious Cosmos, but
rather leaving a visible wound, namely the difference
that art experience invokes.
Rome, November, 1995
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Massimo Bignardi -
2000
Writing for Simona Weller
Anybody with a trained eye would move beyond the mere
chronological list of Simona Weller's artistic experiences
to concentrate on the artist's continuous oscillation
between narrative tension, intrinsic in the writer,
and that tension related to the emotional nature of
form and color. The first is directly implied in the
well consolidated creative background of the artist,
namely her writer status, which makes her a refined
and attentive narrator. Weller's bibliographic production
includes
Il complesso di Michelangelo, a book which
appeared in 1976; the more recent Ritratto di Angelica
and Una rosa nel cuore, dedicated to the fascinating
figure of Suzanne Valadon in the Montmartre scene.
Her narration is subordinated to a certain analytic
rigor addressed to the reader's gaze-the inner eye's
capacity to critically observe (like the painter)
the world around. Such type of beholding is induced
by the visual experience as witnessed in the biography
about Angelica Kauffman. These are precious advice
for a possible access into an imaginative suggestion
which transforms writing into graphic form. Following
the ideal, subtly traced in this exhibition, the graphic
form conveys its "cohabitation" with writing
and becomes more intense when the line is synthesized
in the repeated sign of the wave. Such geometric synthesis
implies an evocation of a game of voids and solids,
of concave and convex forms; in other words, without
too many metaphoric preambles, it evokes a sensuality
imbued in the natural order. According to Kandinskij,
in the world of painting a graphic form holds, beside
its autonomous value, a relative element born out
of its connection with the chromatic form. The latter
is the key which combines the two moments (autonomy
and relativity) and brings together Simona Weller's
recent experiences. Weller's mid 1970s works, produced
in the general dominating climate of American conceptual
art, are inspired, though in a chromatic form, by
Van Gogh and Seurat's color. The path of this exhibition
begins with the works inspired by Seurat. The large
canvas Talatta Talatta of 1978 fully explains
the artist's choices, emphasizing both the emotional
values of color, related to the symbolist atmospheres
of the French painter's canvases (according to Filiberto
Menna the beginning of modern art analytic line),
and the re-evaluation of the tache or spot
as a unity of a graphic code (graphic form) reflected
in the lyric titles: Caro Seurat, aspettando
un pomeriggio di domenica per tornare all'isola.
In this high quality painting Weller seems to observe
Seurat, through the Diviosionism of Balla's Elisa
al Pincio. Other works in this selected anthology
correspond exactly to this time in which the artist
discovers her authentic narrative style. Small works,
solicited by hidden naturalistic images proposed in
the guise of details from post- impressionist art
works with taches, become graphic forms (as
drawing and project) and chromatic forms (symbolic
evidence). Weller insists on the latter type of form
clearing the pictorial field from any figural reference.
The idea of banishing any possible referentiality
is a choice, which denotes a desire to push the pictorial
dictate to the registers intrinsic in lyric abstraction,
partially present in those works where writing is
given as synthesis of sign and color, or articulated
through the reordering of superimposed paper stripes.
In this sense one should take in consideration works
like Controluce di parole, Nessuna onda può
whose formal organization recalls the works exhibited
a few years ago in Ravello. The effort here is to
provide chromatic form with two compositional values:
an absolute one and a relative one recalling, in full
autonomy, what had been argued by Kandinskij. The
absolute value emerges from the combination of bright
colors, almost always in their pure states, providing
rhythm to the flickering light effects with minor
tonal passages. Such process simultaneously models
the surface and circumscribes the field of attention
finally focusing on certain details of the work.
This type of choice evokes a narrator who aims at
constructing a tale in which he-she meets characters
and objects closely. This is the essence of mental
and emotional states epitomized as testimonies of
our meeting with "reality": dictates understood
as manifestations of our consciousness. Although in
the last works by Weller it is difficult to exemplify
a relative value, this is, in some way, expressed
by the color-silhouette. In certain works, like the
two ovals made for this exhibition, the geometric
partition of the silhouette is an expression of a
temporary analysis of the imaginative dictate. The
latter seems to have been solicited by an interest
imbued with a naturalist matrix. Such origins induce
the artist to schematize the symmetric movement of
sea waves, its instability, frozen and synthesized
by the continuous references to a silhouette which
recalls the moon quarters - a form inspired by the
great canvases C'è una casa e l'amore, i
figli e il fuoco, gli amici… The reproduction
of this last image concludes the catalogue of the
1989 Narni exhibition. This perception is a provisional
location anchored at a renewed desire to observe the
visible realm, addressing, in the geometric partition,
the stimuli offered by certain works dated from the
end of the 70s such as Socchiudi gli occhi e guarda…
an image distantly interpreted by a writing-sign which
evokes Van Gogh and with him the wind of passions.
The same passions animate the pages dedicated to Kauffmann,
in which transpires a subtle autobiographic profile:
a tale which follows a plot and a web of parallel
stories, where the passions, which have animated the
desire to gaze beyond the eye barriers, come back.
Salerno, December 2000
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Sandro Barbagallo
- 2001
In Search for the Lost Sign
When, only nineteen years old, Simona Weller enters
the Italian art scene, the controversy between abstractionism
and representation is raging. The young Neo-Dada of
Piazza del Popolo have come out, while in the United
States Pop Art is widely popular. When Simona visits
the exhibitions, she gets confused by the vitality
of Guttuso and, on the other hand, by the informal
non-representation of matter. Among the women artists,
Simona Weller loves Maselli, she is intrigued by Fioroni
and she does not understand Carla Accardi. She does
not identify with the artists the authoritative "Paese
sera" writes about, but she is sure she will
become a painter herself.
After a classical education she attends the Academy
of Fine Arts in Rome, to legitimate her path in front
of her family and maybe in front of herself. She needs
this path to take possession of all the techniques,
from clay-moulding to etching, from fresco to the
great Italian tradition of egg-painting. She needs
this path to have a chance to draw live everyday and
to then fly away, towards distant lands. The chance
is a UNESCO scholarship for a country in the far East:
Siam. Destiny or instinct, Simona looks for her own
path by travelling, long before those young people
who, in ten years' time, will have the myth of India.
Like all the first, great travels, hers as well prove
a sort of initiation. Being in touch with other worlds,
religions and civilizations, the Italian culture's
disputes, the art-system's intrigues now seem small
and wretched.
During her adolescence she feeds herself with travel
accounts, is charmed by Gauguin's exoticism and considers
Galileo Chini an important artist whose lesson she
will rediscover in the landscapes of Thailand. In
this period, she dreams and lives like a young explorer
from Rimbaud and Verlaine's time. She still has not
focused the fact that she is a woman. And a pioneer.
The thing that strikes her most over there, are the
details of that indecipherable writing. Cuneiform
characters and ideograms whose secret harmony Simona
senses (and records as something that could be used
one day). Down there, everything looks wonderful:
the sea, the rivers, the rice-fields, the jungle,
the dead cities. People's clothes, the iridescent
colour of the fabrics, the bronze glare on the women's
skin, the violent smells. I linger over these years
of Simona's youth because I think that, from this
experience, she got the life-long originality of her
research and a strong feeling of identity.
Coming back from each of her long travels (in Thailand,
Egypt, Spain) Simona keeps on studying at the Academy,
until she graduates. She studied with Ferrazzi, Mafai
and Maccari who did their best to convey her disenchantment
and scepticism for a life she dreams dedicated to
the art.
Suddenly, she understands that being a woman is a
discriminating factor (she must constantly pretend
not to hear the list of clichés poured out
by whoever she meets). When, seemingly, everybody
tries to discourage her, she defies destiny once again:
she gets married, has two children and self-exiles
in the countryside of Umbria to paint, she says, far
from worldly temptations.
Of course her solitude, her contact with the nature
and her maternity deeply affect her work. Her painting
frees itself from the academic and folk remains and
begins to express her own independent world. Her technique
improves and gets sharper. In this period ( 1965 -
1970 ) she uses enamels and inks on precious papers.
Rice-papers (Chinese or Japanese) or canvas prepared
like walls. On these surfaces appear insects, fossils,
wild berries drawn with an entomologist's precision
and with Klee's poetry.
Every time Simona leaves her retreat, she visits the
great exhibitions and gets the attention of some critics.
She has already started inserting in her paintings
- though shyly - sentences, verses, writings inspired
by the Latin inscriptions you see on Roman ruins.
Her natural-surrealistic ( as the first critics called
it ) world is still connected to the cycle of life,
to the metamorphosis of the things that sprout just
below - or immediately up - the earth.
Meanwhile, in the art world, anything goes. In 1962,
the Biennial exhibition in Venice definitely launched
the Pop Art and, together with this new trend, it
launched an artist Simona will truly admire: Louise
Nevelson. Then the trends will follow one another:
Kinetic art, Op art… A committed Neo-representation
goes on ( commitment expressed for example by inserting
the silhouette of an American soldier in Vietnam watching
landscapes and hyper-realistic still-lives ). The
first sado-maso fantasies and happenings of the body-art
begin.
- It took a lot of moral strength and self-confidence
not to let the inclusion-exclusion game touch you.
The important exhibitions were, even then, the monopoly
of a few critics and it wasn't easy to enter the "system"
staying true to yourself… Just think that we
used to say, as a joke: Tom? Oh… he still paints
with a brush!
In this state of mind, in the beginning of the seventies,
Simona faces a personal revolution. She gets divorced,
goes back to Rome and starts teaching painting techniques
as an assistant to Giulio Turcato. In the same time
she lives with the poet and critic Cesare Vivaldi.
As the world surrounding her changes, her painting
starts anew. These are the years she finds out again
that a painting can be filled with signs and words,
not only colour. In the beginning, it's just black
surfaces she traces on signs imitating the graffiti
on the walls or on the blackboards, powerfully expressing
her unconscious but also her dreams as an unhappy
child. Simona says that, among the paintings that
moved her the most during her first visit to Paris
(1971) there was one of Picabia - not exactly a painting
- covered by the signings and the sentences of his
friends.
From the blackboards, the painter moves to the copybook
pages, where the children's sign alternates with the
intervention of a hypothetical teacher. The first
critics who wrote about this cycle were - of course
- Vivaldi, then Enrico Crispolti and Murilo Mendes.
In 1973 she's invited to the Tenth Quadriennial exhibition
in Rome, in the non-representational section. She
had already exhibited in Remo Pastori's gallery "Il
punto" in Turin and in Calice Ligure, winning
the attention of some important Turinese art collectors.
She was nominated for the Bolaffi prize by Giuliano
Briganti, who was apparently hit by her showroom at
the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome.
Now her black works, a sort of trompe-l'oeil
of blackboards, alternate with big, coloured canvas
where a word traced countless times, stratify forming
a weaving, a texture. The frequent trips to Paris
and the impact with the Impressionists hit her deeply.
To trace the key-word ( grass, sea, dawn, corn etc.)
the artist uses an oil pastel. The colours follow
the technique of pointillism so the texture is never
flat and, watched from a distance, it conveys an extraordinary
effect of depth. Simona Weller has therefore reached
what she was looking for: to define a mental landscape
through an apparently non-semantic word that, filling
the surface of the canvas, becomes itself a painting.
After such achievement, any of her colleagues would
have stopped. But the pressure of the market (these
years she starts her business with the art dealers)
leads her to a renewal, to grow and achieve new goals.
Though belonging to no group, Weller could be historicized
in the area of a lyrical abstractionism or better
of a written painting (therefore of a non-representation
of sign); on the contrary, she's been by force inserted
in the current of visual poetry. Not accidentally
in fact, she will participate to several exhibitions
organized by Mirella Bentivoglio for this trend. This
mistake will be repeated by Nello Ponente who, in
the great exhibition "Lines of the artistic research
in the last twenty years" in 1980 at the Palazzo
delle Esposizioni in Rome, will place Weller in the
visual poetry section. For these exhibitions Simona
uses rigorously black or white works, avoiding all
decorations, disliked by the visual poets. But this
forced insertion shall not put the artist at ease,
because she does not accept the definition and cannot
give up her colour painting. A painting that, in time,
changes through rubbings and drippings. Until, after
a conceptual study on Seurat's work she extracts,
undo and recreates details from "La Grande Jatte"
and starts working on the tache. Colour stains
that rub or give a rhythm to the writing below. In
fact, while in the beginning of the seventies her
writing stratifies on itself, now ( 1978 ) it becomes
a structure that gives a solidity to her work.
In 1978, Lorenza Trucchi invites Weller to Palazzo
delle Esposizioni for the "Art-Research"
exhibition. This allows her to make the proceeding
clear, setting in a room both the details from Seurat,
painted on long horizontal stripes and two big works
dedicated to the sea: the first is solar and diurnal,
the second lunar and nocturnal. The showroom is called:
"Paraphrasing Seurat, a Sunday afternoon on
the… Tiberine island".
The message is ironic , but also provocative for some
critics who promote a representation "at all
costs" and will comment: "We understand
but don't share it".
This act of faith in a painting more and more diminished
by the trends will be awarded that year with an invitation
to the Biennial in Venice, in the "From page
to space" exhibition, held at Magazzini del Sale.
In this occasion Simona Weller will create square
modules ( cm 50x50 ) as a wall - journal that follows
all the steps of her written painting.
With that invitation Weller ends a cycle of her research.
One day, in her studio in via Margutta, 48 ( where
three quarters of post war Italian art passed ) she's
gluing fragments of old tempera of hers. She cuts
the stripes of painting she thinks are good and glues
them on some background she painted: grass or sea,
as usual. The relief and up-to-light effect is so
interesting that it will become the basis for her
coming research. She actually affirms that her painting
has always been growing on itself. In the first part
of the eighties her research takes a new interesting
turn, after her participation to an exhibition organized
by Flavio Caroli and Luciano Caramel at Rotonda della
Besana in Milan - "Textual: words and images"
(the first and the last) about the phenomenon of painting-writing
through the centuries. The eighties closed with her
retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art
in Macerata, where director Elverio Maurizi invites
her and writes for her a good essay.
The first twenty years of her artistic history have
seen Simona busy on all fronts. She published a fundamental
essay on the Italian female artists in the 20th century,
entered feminist circles and participated to international
shows of female artists. In the spring of 1976 she
lived a few months in New York, where she met important
artists (though far from her own trend) like Marcia
Hafif, Robert Morris, Simone Forti. She also met the
great art manager Leo Castelli who suggested her to
settle in Soho, to look for a loft and to become a
part of New York school. For this brilliant future
Simona should leave Italy, her two children and her
beloved partner, her job as a teacher, extraordinary
friends and the culture she belongs to. A humanistic,
European, maybe decadent culture, but her own. The
brief American experience confirms the quality of
her research and makes her identity stronger. You
can't confuse the art market with art, she says.
In this decade Simona meets and makes friends with
some of the "great old ones" of Italian
art: from Giuseppe Capogrossi to Giorgio de Chirico,
from Nino Corpora to Giulio Turcato, from Toti Scialoja
to Alberto Burri, from Afro Basaldella to Mauro Reggiani.
To write the essay "Michelangelo's complex"
she also meets Edita Broglio and Antonietta Raphäel,
Carla Accardi, Titina Maselli, Adriana Pincherle,
the Levi Montalcini sisters and many more. Through
the tales and memories of all those artists, her "romantic"
belief grows stronger.
Moreover, every year from 1970 to 1980, from June
to September she works in Liguria, in the triangle
Finale Ligure-Calice-Albisola, where she meets Andy
Warhol, who's writing his autobiography while hosted
by the Swiss art manager Janneret. In those restless
Ligurian summers, Simona starts working on ceramics,
also participating in an international exhibition
at Villa Faraggiana in Albisola. She will complete
this research working for short periods and up till
now in the factories of Deruta.
In time, the excessive flow of the writing that fills
the space of the canvas like an obsessive horror
vacui, becomes a web the creativity of the artist
feels trapped in.
After the study on Seurat she passes to the space
in Cubism. From Braque, Picasso, Severini, she isolates
details she mixes up with fragments of her own life
and parts of her old works. This is the origin of
a series of big panels on set-designing material that
express the suggestion of a historical avant-garde
she absorbed and reinvented, surely in a more mature
and personal way than the clumsy cubist influence
affecting the artists during the fifties. Also her
titles were inspired by Gertrud Stein's writings ("Ode
to the eyelashes of a Lady") while the critical
text was written by Palma Bucarelli and translated
in Dutch and German for a travelling exhibition from
Rome to Ferrara and from Amsterdam to Berlin, whose
title will be another quotation from Stein: "A
sign is the specimen spoken". This is therefore
an educated, deftly executed painting. Anyway, in
this cycle, too, black works appear, reminding us
of the old blackboards. I think Simona stops writing
in the paintings at a new turn of her private life.
In this period the artist writes books, articles,
essays. The writing is back on the page, so the painting
can receive something else.
The invitation to 1986 the Quadriennial exhibition
allows Weller to go a step further. Her sign, or its
fragment, turns into a wave-like macro-module. Actually,
these signs are but fragments of words. The superficial
observer, ignoring those passages, reads in those
signs a link with Balla's "flag-wavings".
I have always rejected this association because I
think that, in Weller's paintings, the linearity of
the writing stays alive, from left to right. From
now on, Simona's painting goes through a highly experimental
phase, during which she uses different materials,
reaching its peak in the nineties. Here are relief
paintings, visible frames, cuttings. As if the canvas
and what's represented on it had to bear the fury
of the elements, fire, water and wind. The "Happy
shipwrecks" cycle is born, inspired by those
popular verses by Ungaretti: "And he immediately
goes back to his traveling, after the shipwreck, the
old sea dog…".
A more than symbolic sentence that reflects the attitude
of the artist towards her life and her art.
Following Weller's history year by year, analysing
her tight relationship with the art and documenting
on her rich bibliography, I realized I had a great
responsibility and a privilege. I had the chance to
draw some conclusions about an artist who, through
the years, found an independent and recognizable identity
of her own, in spite of all cultural terrorism.
What Marisa Volpi wrote in 1976 is still worthy (Galleria
San Fedele-Milano): "… The subtle game is
between the title announcing its semantic in a literary
way and the painting, physically implying the nature…
A nature and a landscape revealing their symbolic
essence as something else, universe, unknown, unconscious,
endlessly changing, from beauty to desolation…"
but, above all, I agree with Volpi writing: "It's
indicative that this aspect of Abstractionism, derived
by Impressionism, has been concealed by the puritan
intentions of historical avant-gardes, like Constructivism,
like Bauhaus and its derivations, who wanted to state
the problem of a modern style and tried all means
to eliminate the individual relationship with self
and world perception".
And individual perception is the fulcrum that best
characterizes Weller's long research, whose language,
staying in touch with formal colour tradition (from
Seurat to Balla to Dorazio) lately manages to astonish
us, with unpredictable expressive solutions. Solutions
not only connected to paint or canvas, but also to
recycled materials (carton and used wood). The work
executed on clay moulding by the artist, whose sign
becomes matter, deserves a speech apart… But
this is another introduction.
In this exhibition at Giraldi Gallery (not accidentally,
Bruno Giraldi has been one of Simona Weller's first
admirers), forty years of intense and rich work are
represented and, though being widely historicized,
they can get a further and definitive recognition.
Because, as a journalist wrote for her retrospective
exhibition "The colour of time" (Narni,
1989), Simona Weller is surely the most important
and representative artist of her generation.
Roma, June 2001
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Maria Teresa Benedetti
- 2003
Letters from an Italian Painter to Vincent Van
Gogh
"We are such a small thing and, to become a
ring in the chain of the artists, we have to pay
a high price in terms of youth, health, freedom",
states Van Gogh in a letter dating 10th May 1890.
To this symbolic ring is bound a suggestive side of
the artistic work of Simona Weller who, for long and
more than once, has kept a tight dialogue with the
writings of this great Dutchman.
A relationship with a history of its own. During the
seventies, her painting-writing was very close to
the bristling and the fury of her imaginary interlocutor,
joined through the quotation of isolated words, cried
on the surface of the canvas and associated to a sign
at times violent, accepted, denied, deleted that crushed
the rhythm of the path. Nowadays, her painted page
is the tale of a quieter meditation, crossed by an
involuntary harmony, even though full of a repressed
restlessness, connected to the reduced fever we can
find in some of Van Gogh's writings, where communication
gets more intensely internal.
The painter tenaciously pursues a self-excavation,
stimulated by the enlightenment offered by some emblematic
sparks, received without a clear order, in a ceaseless
flow. She works slowly, tracing a sign full of chromatic
vibrations, repeating the action in a dowsing research
for a communication with the rhythms of that extraordinary,
bare sensitivity. She adheres to the aspects that
better represent the truth of a state of mind, reflecting
them with the characteristics of a dream and the will
of her fantasy.
Just like the word in Van Gogh, her sign shows longings,
desires, fury, tearing - all projected in a space
where the unconscious turns to be far more poetical
than conscious life. That's not the sign of a psychic
escape but the will to record this spontaneous, ceaseless
flow on the way of an initiation.
The dynamics of the action reflect that feeling of
intense motion animating the Van Goghian universe;
the iterative, sometimes circular structure of the
sign seems to recall the constant repetition, in the
letters of the Dutchman, of terms like "unite",
"to link", "to tie", "to
bring near", "to embrace". A repetitiveness
in which the elements integrate, get mixed up and
overlap endlessly. A microcosm is born that eludes
all decorative attitude and concentrates, through
a few elements, the vital motion in a controllable
space. The signs then alternate with small episodes
that induce the imagination to narrate a tale.
As the weaving gets complicated, the artist turns
back to the burning side of Van Gogh's personality,
recalling the vortex that sweeps the canvas with the
movement of a brush; back to the breaking lines, so
similar to a furious yet tender wave, that implies
a mystical structure. A way to detect the non-duration,
the abolition of time, the life in an eternal present.
In the latest paintings, blue dominates; the colour
of dreams that, as some semiologists state, is the
first to be perceived by the child soon after birth.
This confirms an attitude, admitted by the artist
herself, that evokes children's writing and somehow
reflects its sublime innocence.
Rome, May 2003
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Paolo Alei - 2005
An Interpretation of Simona
Weller's Painting-Writing
As an art historian of the Renaissance I was at first
intimidated by Simona Weller's complex and important
contribution to contemporary art. Then, once the dialogue
between spectator and work of art was established,
the latter appeared as a visual manifestation elaborated
with original technique and dense with meaning. The
aim of this essay is to analyze the meaning and technique
of a particular phase of Weller's career, namely her
visual study on the possible functions of the word
within the image. In certain canvases of the painter
the word becomes a sort of ductus repeated
as a module. A module which is not a mere geometric
figure but, and this is Weller's invention, a word
chosen for its evocative content. The painter's favorite
terms, sea, grass, wheat, sky, dawn (mare, erba,
grano, cielo, alba) are used as serial repetitions
painted with bright pastel colors on monumental canvases.
The history of Western art is imbued with a verbal
component perfected in different media and means.
From the ancient Horatian simile of ut pictura
poesis, images and words confront each other according
to the complex theories of these two arts: poetry
has inspired painting and vice versa in a fluid exchange
of ideas and suggestions. The two arts have often
followed analogous models, but at times the association
has been analogical: from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs
to medieval illuminated manuscripts, from painted
voices of Beato Angelico to the mysterious sense of
Et in Arcadia ego by Poussin. Moreover, one
must not forget the phonetic experiments of futurism
and contemporary computer-generated writing in which
letters, words, phrases and texts support images or
become images themselves.
Simona Weller studied classical art and began her
career as an academic painter before experimenting
with various tendencies of modern art: from impressionism
to divisionism, from cubism to surrealism and dadaism.
Her painting-writing might be associated with the
expressive styles of Novelli, Boetti, Twombly and
Basquiat (though this last elaborated his graffiti
and blackboards about fifteen years later), but Weller
comes to this language with her own profoundly different
artistic identity. If the so called "blackboards"
of Simona Weller share certain elements with Basquiat
and Twombly, her serial words differ from the trends
of this artistic dialogue between Rome and New York
to establish her as an artist with her own particular
style. Undoubtedly, Weller is neither the first nor
the last artist to have employed painted words on
canvas, but she is the only one to have used an original
artistic process which, employing a simple word-module,
is capable of evoking emotionally the feeling of a
dawn, a sunset over the sea or a field of wheat.
In Weller's work a word is decodified in its manifestation
as writing, in its repetition and superimposition
to weave colours employed according to the parameters
of divisionism. Let us take the term "sea"
(mare): in Weller's work it is not merely indicative
of a vast extension of water but also of a surface
that contains within itself constant movement of waves
or even storms. The word grass (erba) and wheat
(grano), whose blades or ears moved by the
wind, follow the same principles of movement and extension.
For the artist, infinity is not merely implied in
the immensity of the ocean or in the unending expanse
of meadows or fields of wheat but in the universal
immensity of nature itself.
Thus, the infinite is seen to be a constant principle
in these works at both a spatial and creative level
in time. Water has always been the most evident symbol
of the natura naturans, the symbol par excellence
of the renewal of nature through rain generated by
clouds born of the sea. It is not surprising, therefore,
that by repeating the word sea (mare) on the
canvas, the artist does not fix a single idea, iconically
frozen on the surface, but leaves a suggestion of
constant fluctuation in time and space. Similarly,
grass (erba) and wheat (grano) represent
not only the symbols of fertility, but also the passage
of the seasons through the eternal cycle of life and
death. Hence, in the canvases Erba and Grano,
colours and pigments are subject to a temporal and
physical metamorphosis in the process of writing in
order, at times, to become what they had been in the
beginning. No wonder that the supporting perimeter
cannot contain either the painted concept or the extension
of the pictorial expression. The painting suggests
the expansion of writing beyond the confines of the
canvas.
Although horizontally organized, Weller's writing
is neither linear nor repetitive in graphic form or
its colours. The word or, better, the act of writing
becomes a blue wave, a green blade or golden ear of
wheat that changes tonality according to the light
of the sun whether at its zenith, at sunset or at
dawn. In Talatta talatta (1976-78) the surface
is transformed into reflecting foam, shining as if
wet. In the works "grass" and "wheat"
(erba and grano) (1971-74, reinterpreted
in this century) the colours and pigments become fiber
as if transformed into vegetal textile. Thus Weller's
word is a synecdoche, a sign that refers us back to
the total perception of her creation a part, as indicated
by the rhetorical trope, signifying the whole. Rhetorical
references can also be found in the structure of the
work itself where a sign is repeated as an anaphora.
Writing, understood as a continuum, becomes a kind
of prayer, or a litany to the point of becoming an
alarming presage, a dramatic cry. The artist has realised
the idea of figure and discourse interwoven in word
and image.
How can writing become a form of visual art? Weller's
writing is analogous to drawing. Through the act of
marking the surface she explores, without fixing,
the stream of thought with her hand. As if evoking
Leonardo's act of artistic creation through the componimento
inculto, Weller's representation of nature comes
into being through elements in movement. Like the
Renaissance master, Weller's hand explores not once,
but many times thanks to her technique of superimposition.
The artist superimposes word upon word to the point
of evoking the idea of the componimento inculto,
the composition that, by remaining an ingeniously
open form, leads the spectator to participate with
his emotions in the subjugated chaos of the work.
In Weller's paintings a form is born from another,
a word is truncated by the following one which, in
turn, generates a further line of writing. Then, suddenly
one or more terms are cancelled and rewritten elsewhere.
Superimposition is a process which denies perspective
but not spatial depth. Every word reveals something
of the one underneath, which comes to the surface
in spatial and semantic terms.
While Leonardo's composition leaves his ideas and
forms in a state of chaotic representation, Weller
imposes upon herself a geometric model that, while
it denies the figurative, reorders chaos according
to precise structures. Lines, grids, bands of colours
evoke not only Cézanne's pre-cubist experiments
but above all the page of a note-book and reasserts
that the artist is writing with painting and painting
with writing. Weller's structural lines establish
a sequence and do not allow the work to overwhelm
the artist completely. Indeed, the painter controls
the work through precise operations. These organisational
parameters, however, do not cease to evocate chaos:
the chaos of life, the chaos of nature, the chaos
that like the tireless hand of the artist continues
to generate further creative forces. Through this
fascinating interplay between order and chaos the
work, like the dancing star praised by Nietzsche,
takes its shape.
When at the end of the 1970s Simona Weller dedicated
works to the word sea (mare), painted writing was
no longer a childish or casual accumulation of words,
but a carefully thought out study. Weller's painting-writing
is constituted by dynamic lines of a phenomenological
character. The artist establishes a correspondence
between the movement of the sea, wind and grass and
the movement of the hand. In the end a deliberate
relationship between the subject and its execution
is created. The artist represents the subject in a
way that the eyes of the mind and the hand work reciprocally.
Charged with violent colors, these active lines are
like musical scores and as such they can be concise,
strong or subtle. In this sense Mare mare, Talatta
talatta and its variations have a capacity to
bewitch in sound and light like a surface fluctuating,
moving and reflecting the sun's rays at the different
hours of the day.
At times the serial repetition is obsessive and the
superimposition drives the emotional tension to the
point in which painted words are transformed into
a woven surface. If a close view reveals the microcosm
of the individual word made out of a divisionist sign,
a far view suggests the macrocosm of a text made of
superimpositions. Mare mare and Talatta
talatta are intertwined paintings in which words
almost disappear and become illegible. From far away
the painting is emotionally grasped rather than read
intellectually. Consequently, its meaning is conveyed
by means of color, movement and texture. In this second
approach it is no longer the referentiality of a single
semiotic sign but the apparent general semiotic effect
that fills Weller's painting. By creating a web of
words Weller creates a work interwoven with signs
of colour which cover, without canceling, the warp
of the canvas beneath.
The artist is a sort of Penelope who weaves a semiotic
cloth and a plot of a poem. Even more Weller is an
Ovidian heroine, a sort of a Philomela who weaves
words to communicate her despair. Philomela, raped,
deprived of her tongue and imprisoned in a tower,
communicates with her sister Procne through words
of fire secretly woven on a piece of fabric. However,
Philomela's woven voice implies a spectator who, like
her sister, understands the coded language employed
by the maker and can free the silent prisoner. Philomela's
communication is part of the Metamorphoses,
a poem, but the woven voice is not a poem or rather
is not only a poem. Philomela's fabric with its flame-marked
signs can be considered a surface that communicates
by means of semiotic systems shared with painting.
Like Philomela's mute voice, Wellerpainted writing,
even if it differs in its message, evokes poetry,
but it is above all a visual work of art.
Simona Weller transforms the metaphorical communication
invented by Ovid into a contemporary message through
signs elaborated by modern art. The major influences
on her seem to derive from impressionism. However,
for Weller nature is neither Van Gogh's Provencal
field nor the water around the Grand Jatte
of Seurat. Weller's nature is a universal ideal which
exists in the imagination of the artist. Although
Talatta talatta was inspired by a sunset on
the beach of Sabaudia, it does not have any recognizable
element identifiable with the Tyrrhenian Sea. No banlieu
on the horizon, no peasant at work or bourgeois on
vacation, no narrative appears on the horizon: there
is only the immense vastness of nature. On a more
technical level, moreover, the Weller's written word
somehow challenges the divisionist brushstroke. Van
Gogh's brushstroke represents wheat or grass as a
vertical filament. On the other hand, writing, though
disconnected, implies a certain horizontality proper
to the rhetoric Weller aims at imposing. In this structuralisation
the artist seems to refer to the early works by Mondrian
who employed divisionist taches and a grid structure.
Although Weller evokes divisionism in the way she
elaborates a sign, Mondrian in her structure and rejects
futurism in her meaning, some of her graphic experiments
could make us think of certain inventions of Marinetti's
poetry. Undoubtedly, the painter does not look to
Marinetti as a source of meaning, but to his having
freed words from the constraints of conventional syntax.
In Weller's painting we do not find the mythology
of war, praise of destruction or, much less yet, a
spirit of rebellion. Rather, tonality and the movement
of her painting have an almost contemplative, at times
even a romantic, character. Weller evokes Marinetti's
semantics and transforms it into a fundamentally different
pictorial communication. In Weller's painting the
fevered insomnia, leaps, blows and battles of futurist
literature become wave, foam, wind, light and, in
the most dynamic passages, fire and tempest. Marinetti's
urban and technological velocity is transformed into
the movement of nature, a nature, of course, which
is not controlled by man but rather, even if sometimes
at risk, dominates and enchants the beholder through
contemplation. Weller perfects the so called inebriating
word freed from punctuation, syntax, laws and norms.
They are onomatopoeic words, at times olfactory, at
times auditory, that in any case always remain visual.
The artist writes or paints with words of different
colors and typographic structures on blackboards but
in the works under analysis here she favours the horizontality
of handwriting. According to Marinetti free words
do not aim at humanising nature (animal, vegetable,
mineral), but on the contrary naturalise style by
seeking to make it live from the very essence of the
material. In Weller's representation of the sea, style
is made liquid and becomes water with all its particles
moving under the rays of light, losing its verbal
structure to assume the substance evoked.
More so than futurism Weller's words elaborate a research
between words and objects or, better yet, between
les mots e les choses to evoke the long and
complex French debate from Mallarmé to Foucault.
By assuming a different appearance, the form of a
word (especially following the near-far effect) becomes
the object whose representation is intended.
Weller's art suggests a reflection on the link between
words and that which they designate by studying all
the riches hidden by the material invoked by the word
itself. For this reason the interweaving of words,
even if structured according to the parameters of
geometry, has a natural and organic power. Just like
the poetry of Francis Ponge, Weller's work is united
to the object under examination so that the sea of
Mare Mare becomes liquid, is filled with the
colours and emotions that this process implies. The
observer finds himself in front of a synthesis of
the word between proper noun, common noun, concrete
noun and modified noun, and all of their corollary
adjectives, and, finally, the abstract noun indirectly
perceived only through the emotions generated by optical
effects. Weller's word not only directs us to the
object itself it evokes also to the individual idea
that, we, individual spectators autonomous in our
interpretations, make of it. Thus, the final understanding
of this painting-writing is linked to the idea that
we, the spectators, diverse and autonomous in our
perception, have constructed of the word in question
according to our experience and consequently according
to an interpretative key that can be either cognitive
or affective. Here the work of Simona Weller leads
to a possible reflection on semiotic anarchy and thus
suggests a move toward deconstruction.
Simona Weller knows that language alone (understood
as vocabulary) cannot reach a level of representation
like that of the visual arts. Therefore, she elaborates
language in a metaphoric sense. Language needs rhetorical
strategies, the metaphors and colours of poetry and
painting to arrive at what the word evokes. Weller's
word-module immediately recalls the object to which
it refers in a more immediate and emotional way than
the word itself. Yet at times emotion and passion,
though lucid, surpass the word's structure just as
affectivity surpasses cognition and, in some cases,
arrives at the point where chaos is more difficult
to tame. Here the illusion of determinacy enters a
crisis and the theme becomes overwhelmingly emotional,
impressive, open, infinite and indeterminate. The
organising geometry of the interweaving and the structuring
rhythm of the lines seem to cede to the general affectivity
generated by the incommensurability of the universal
element invoked. Finally the eurhythmic articulation
becomes symmetrical growth and then pure emotion through
optical vibrations, cancellations and superimposition.
From a close up of the word to a distant perception
of the superimposition, the surfaces of these paintings
become an optical effect with vibrations of color
and light. Their extraordinary effect suggests the
importance of Simona Weller's painting in which the
pairing of chaos and control reaches a dialectic tension
between enchantment and delirium, cognition and affectivity,
the determinate and the indeterminate, the near and
the far, the written and the erased, the visible and
the invisible.
Calcata, April 2005
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Sandro Barbagallo
- 2005
Art, Summer, Nostalgia
It was summer when Simona Weller returned to Finalborgo.
She guided me around town, showed me the tower in
via Nicotera 34 where she had lived in the fabulous
Seventies; and that bar beyond the city walls, where
some of her best paintings first saw the light of
day. I knew that in these very places, Cesare Vivaldi
-her partner back then- had written some memorable
works of poetry, inspired by art, by the fullness
of love, by the sufferings of parting; the painful
leaving these beloved places and the slow subsiding
of the floodwaters of love.
In the summer 2004, Simona was invited to Finale Ligure
to present her recent novel Memoires of a respectable
painter. The novel had been read by the right
people, the same people who did their best to organize
this twofold exhibition. Simona magically rediscovered
her old friends and found new ones, because in her
book she extensively writes about both Finalborgo
and Calice. Most of all, her book recalls that very
special atmosphere that a group of artists can catalyse
toward themselves. An atmosphere made of hopes, expectations,
projects, dreams of glory and, why not, an impalpable
touch of madness.
As far as I know, nobody has yet thought about historicizing
what I would call, without uncertainties, the "School
of Calice". And don't tell me that the artists
were too heterogeneous in terms of generations and
trends. What I believe was important, is that each
one of them was able to defend his/her avant-garde
and that the "spirit of time" freely inspired
the art of these now famous names. Let us not forget
that in the cities of the Seventies, art was mainly
characterized by a strong political involvement, which
often made painting look like propaganda. Between
Finale and Calice, artists would be welcomed to a
happy island where nobody had to prove anything to
anybody else and where the artists (Nangeroni, Reggiani
or Scanavino, for example) had already gone through
their own "revolutions". By reading through
the list of the ca. one hundred and twenty names that
passed by Calice, we easily notice that not only was
Calice represented by most of the best Italian art
but, with some exceptions, nobody had taken the path
of an ideology that could in any way mystify their
art. By trend groups, Nangeroni, Mauro Reggiani, Capogrossi,
and Scanalino himself were linked to a kind of painting
that could be generally defined as abstract, being
based on pattern and repetition. The younger artists
(such as Mondino, Nespolo, Mambor, Stefanoni, Ben
Vautier and Weller) were instead influenced by the
great innovations, like American Pop Art, which in
Europe had ancient roots in Art-Brut and in Dada;
which caused the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo, in Rome,
to be called Neo-dada.
If we were therefore to find a common line between
all these artists, I would call it freedom or spiritual
autonomy. In order to fully understand what made the
Calice years and its legend so unique, we must focus
on the artists' working conditions. The first question
we must answer is: what are a young artist's dreams?
In order of relevance, these are: to find a space
that is appropriate for the artist's expressive needs,
i.e. a studio; to be surrounded by a group of supporting
friends that will sustain him/her in the times of
discouragement; to work with a gallery manager who's
is able to promote, defend and circulate the artist's
work.
Finale and Calice met these three important requirements,
and this helped the development of an the appropriate
interest for the area, triggering a certain magnetism
toward the two towns. Artists from Milan, Turin and
Rome, under pressure because of the impossible rent
prices of the big cities, were the first to rent or
buy a studio-house. An example of this is the unforgettable
pink villa that Mondino managed to rent for an unbelievably
low price. It was a typical Ligurian villa that evoked
ghosts because of its stuffed animals and of the colonial
worm-eaten furniture. As Nangeroni would say, the
house looked like its tenant. At the time, Mondino
was painting a cycle of paintings dedicated to the
mystery of the I Ching game.
The summer of 1970 witnessed the arrival of Simona
Weller with her children and Cesare Vivaldi. They
too, called by Emilio Scanavino, were accommodated
at the Hotel Viola. Cesare had a room where he could
write and the "three bambini" (which
includes Simona, who had just turned 30) shared a
large room with a view on the mountains. On the veranda
of that very room, Simona painted her first Ligurian
works. In the hottest afternoons, the family would
go pick mushrooms in the woods of Calizzano. The children
learned to eat snails. One day they captured so many
that they did not even manage to take them to the
kitchen because the snails had organized a revolt,
infesting the whole hotel.
That first summer, the family understood that this
was the right place for them. The children could play
with the other artists' kids; there were three or
four galleries where Simona could exhibit her work;
there were painters and sculptors with whom she could
to compare her work, confront herself, fight, build
friendships. Each group or family found their own
links. Simona Weller's family developed a strong friendship
with the Nangeronis, but they also spent much time
with Mauro Reggiani, leader of Italian abstract art
movement and reckless driver, fisherman, ironic man
and generous friend. And there were all the others:
Nanda Vigo, the Cusumano couple and the D'Ars magazine
group; the artists that Simona already knew from the
youth collective exhibitions, such as De Filippi,
Stefanoni, Mariani, Moncada, Nespolo. Many of them
bought a country house on the hills between Finalborgo
and Calice.
At a certain point, Simona and Cesare, too, decided
to look for a house. By chance, the couple one day
met a kind man named Enrile. When he heard that Simona
was a painter and Vivaldi a poet, the man felt the
urge to show them the attic where he used to find
shelter as a kid. In via Nicotera, Finalborgo, he
guided them up a very steep staircase. He had an undecided
look, he hesitated. When they arrived on top of the
tower, he opened a small door, a secret passage and,
apologizing, he let them into this "Wonderland".
It looked like the scenography from Boheme. The charm
of the place may have been due to the very high and
sloping roof, to the exposed beams on the ceilings,
the fireplaces, the windowsills made of slate, the
niches and the small windows… it was love at
first sight, the answer to the poet's and the painter's
most romantic dreams. Nothing to compare with the
aseptic city homes.
The most interesting part about this was that, touched
by the couple's enthusiasm for his childhood world,
Mr Enrile not only asked for just a symbolic rent
price but he also decided to renovate the whole place
at his expenses.
They moved in the following summer. The Finalborgo
attic had been quickly furnished with many paintings
and many plants. In the first months, Simona painted
(on the floor) the paintings that she later exhibited
at her first Quadrennial exhibition. The following
step was now to look for a studio.
Here began Vivaldi's and Simona Weller's parallel
life in Liguria: they would arrive at the end of May
to leave at the end of September/beginning of October.
Every once in a while, during the other seasons, "pressed
by nostalgia" as Vivaldi wrote in a poem, they
would return to their house in Finale for a few days.
It was a great place to work. Cesare would write poems,
Simona would paint her first important works. All
the tensions caused by competitiveness and race for
success would suddenly dissolve, also because the
couple had decided to not have a telephone.
In order to call relatives and friends, Simona and
Cesare would go to Bar Ercole at the end of the street
(it still stands, but with another name). Once, Palma
Bucarelli, who was correcting an interview that she
was giving Simona, managed to reach her on the public
telephone every day, after sending telegrams.
Liguria was also protecting the couple from the toxins
of unsolved professional relationships. When recalling
the long Ligurian period, Simona speaks of fulfilment
and fullness. She finally had all she could wish for:
art, her children, the right companion in the house
that corresponded to her taste and expectations. A
space filled with imagination and loved things, of
views and dreams.
It seemed that this enchanted time was going to last
forever. Instead, as often happens when we experience
something extraordinary, the two did not feel that
that time was about to be over, together with the
friendships and the acquaintances that they had cultivated.
One evening, the Italian-Swiss gallery manager Anna
Maria Janneret, organized a dinner party in her garden
in Bissano. The guest of honor was Andy Warhol, who
was spending time in Bissano to write his autobiography
in peace. Nobody was yet giving any weight to the
great American artist, who showed up with his usual
pageboy haircut and an ill paleness that certainly
did not make him very likeable at a first glance.
His flabby and unsociable look won him the nickname
of "Polentina" (porridge), a name given
by the children running around him, who were instead
healthy and tan.
It was, again, the kids who contested Franz P. when
he exposed Beuys's conceptual work: "an old coat
and a hat" in the centre of his gallery. Ah,
this childish indignation! This is just to say that
Calice didn't just host any kind of exhibition. Gallery
manager Remo Pastori did his best to present old artists
as well as young artist like Simona. Pastori was an
eccentric character, a fun mythomaniac who, though
young, loved to make others believe that he had lived
with the artists of the historical avant-gardes. He
was very appreciated by the painters of Calice, so
much that they taxed themselves to buy him a Cartier
watch as a sign of gratitude.
A born subjugator, he had managed to convince his
artists that they should not claim anything from the
sale of their works. "It doesn't matter if you
sell, all that matters is who you sell to" he
would say; or "the collection of a great industrial
man is not the same as that of an anonymous expert"
and "artists should pay, for their work be part
of certain collections, so consider yourself privileged".
One day, tired of these sentences that had brought
others to feel gratitude towards him and her to feel
exasperated, Simona suddenly popped up in Pastori's
office. By chance, she noticed a collector leave the
office with one of her painting in his arms; there
was a check on the desk (that must have been more
or less the thirtieth painting of hers that had been
sold, and for which she hadn't seen a penny). With
an incredible wit, Simona grabbed the check:
- This is for me, isn't it Remo?
- Give me at least some change! - he replied, discouraged
and in a thin voice.
Simona Weller gloriously left, laughing.
Two years after her arrival, Simona had rented a former
bank building on the river Aquila, just by the beginning
of Finalborgo. That became her studio and the place
where artists would organize their parties.
In one of his dialectal poems, Vivaldi describes the
studio as follows: "Out the window, the green
shade of pumpkins and apricot trees; on the white
wall, inside, she's working on a canvas where extracts
of words get lost like birds in this white air that
smells like sea. I look at what she's doing: I see
that this canvas is bigger than me, as big as love,
it gets lost out the green window, it covers all of
Finale."
It is in this very period that we bought Vivaldi's
last book of Ligurian poems. Edited by Scheiwiller
in 1980, it included a small lithography by Simona
on a black background. The last poem of the collection
is called "Finale in winter".
"Finale in winter. The palm trees poke the
air like sticks, the sea beats and spits, up to the
sidewalk. In the moist air life seems to hide. But
it's time to return to Rome forever: slowly slowly
we fill the boxes that are awaiting us, empty. It's
cold and I am good at nothing, more and more good
at nothing. I look at your beautiful hands working,
busy in the winter, your face of sun that slightly
warms up the icy windows and I'm not good at telling
you about love."
"It's time to go back to Rome forever",
reads one of the verses. I ask Simona why they decided
to leave. Was it because she had bought the house
in Calcata, much closer to Rome? Was it because someone
had died too young and somebody else was gone? Maybe
it was because of that flood that had furtively penetrated
her studio. Who knows if Umberto Rotella remembers
it. Rotella is another one of the gallery managers
that Simona loves to remember.
It had rained heavily that year, too much. The stream,
dry in the summer, had turned to a river and it had
flooded. The road that separated the studio from the
embankment was completely flooded; the water probably
reached the height of the windows and, from the shutters,
it had penetrated inside. Nobody ever understood how
all that water could possibly have found its way in.
Maybe through the interstices of the windows or from
under the shutters. But water and mud furiously penetrated,
violating that space made of paintings and colours.
The waters reached a height of about one and a half
meters, until -God knows how many days later- the
sun returned, with a strong north wind; the same wind
that had opened the windows, dried up the waters.
But the mud stayed, to hide everything. A beautiful
golden clay covered shelves, easels and tables with
a warm velvety colour. When she opened the shutter,
Simona was with Vivaldi and Umberto Rotelli. They
were shocked. The show was apocalyptic but fascinating
at the same time. It seems that Cesare was singing
some poems by Ungaretti, about happy shipwrecks. Simona
recalls that, before thinking of her works and of
how many of them she had lost, she realized that she
had for the first time understood that the ways of
art are mysterious. In the end, what she was seeing
was a spontaneous art installation and, maybe for
this reason, it was so perfect and exciting. There
was even a long red drool, left by one of the Windsor&Newton
powder colour jars. God knows for how long that jar
had floated over the mud to draw that "desperate
trace of its path". I was staring, hypnotized
at my wounded studio when I heard Cesare murmuring:
we really have to leave now!
This summer 2005, Simona Weller is returning to Liguria
as the great artist she has become. The places of
her youth will honour her and she, through her paintings,
will tell the fairytale of those enchanted years.
The Chiostros of Santa Caterina in Finalborgo and
the Casa del Console in Calice will host many works
that were born in these places and that have then
grown far away from Liguria, in the hearts and in
the memory of the artist that I today have the honour
to introduce to you. I am glad to have been able to
take care of an exhibition like this one; an anthological
painting show which, through colours and poetry, traces
the paths that have inspired an artist that on colours
and poetry has built her own life.
Rome, 10 May 2005
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Alberto Veca - 2005
Reconciled Distance
We are here at the extreme opposite of a tabula rasa
-i.e. something with no trace of what was previously
reported; the protagonist is in fact a "table"
where episodes, memories, notes of words and figures
are in continuous motion, accumulated, just apparently
in a random way, and interrupted only by the physical
borders of the support; otherwise the conversation
would last to infinity.
I can only record some general thoughts about Simona
Weller's work because of lack of time, according to
a modality which is overall tiring but, at the same
time, able to stimulate the essence, not taking advantage
from theoretical calculation and from the "distance"
of a comfortable bibliographic survey, but rather
from a somehow more participated haste, due to the
need to substitute the others' comforting equipment
for spontaneous sensation. In order to do this, I
am favoured by my acquaintance with the artist, made
of various encounters, scattered out in time but always
convincing.
I think that this direct way of working, without schemes
or filters, and the "time" variable are
the crucial elements of the work in question: the
immediateness of the note and its time of realization,
the desire to record the moment and its corrections
are therefore Simona's central attitudes in her acting
as a plastic artist as well as in her parallel acting
as a biased writer and biographer of the feminine
expressiveness of the past.
The work can therefore be seen as an accumulation
of different "sessions" or of different
states of being, different needs to record and therefore
to tell: regardless of the often impressive size of
some works, often very close to that of an art installation,
the image they suggest is that of a blackboard -maybe
because the black background is a recurring choice-
or of a notebook; we are here talking about two spaces
that, if we think about it, are on two opposite ends;
the blackboard is the common space between the actor
and the audience, a willingness of making a path obvious
to all; the notebook is private, often hidden to the
indiscrete eyes.
In this "mimesis" of contrasting instruments
of communication, I believe there is a willingness
to make us approach and "familiarize" with
a material that can have privileged recurring subjects
(as in the recent cycle Letters of an Italian painter
to Vincent Van Gogh) or to play on keywords
of autobiographical nature, whose declination, in
writing and painting, becomes an explicit path of
cross-references, even for the stranger.
The protagonists are therefore the privileged instruments
of memory, caught in their fragile temporary nature
and subject to possible corrections both when writing
line after line, as well as when reading the whole
paragraph.
We are here talking about two different cases of temporary
nature; in the first case -the blackboard - a stroke
of duster can erase all "signs" - I am using
this word to convey an explicit dialectic equivalence
between written word and image - for new possible
adventures; in the second case -the notebook- we can
see a material which is very close to being a diary,
to an internal document, a transitional document,
before it is translated into a "completed"
product, perfectly made according to the rules of
the good manners of communication.
This is certainly a suggestion, probably suggested
by the artist, because the work is, by nature and
at least in this case, "final" in its being
a transparent proof of a procedure determined by erased
hypotheses, that are almost scraped off the surface
to then be substituted, with a variable time interval,
for newinues to consider her privileged reference
point.
In the years we can catch a higher or lower evidence
granted to the various languages used - writing, handwriting,
illustration - in a constant game of precarious equilibriums,
which are though explicit in their being portraits
of an episode, of a "chapter" -if we speak
about narrative metaphor-, of a story whose outlines
are constantly uncertain, played upon memory in the
first place, and on the need to make some proofs emerge
from experience, together with some gathered "echo";
to make it durable in the present, the echo of the
"Table" chosen for the occasion, mixing
everything for the future of a new reader who may
become fond of it, and to therefore make the account,
the page of a diary or the blackboard of a classroom
become
current.
Milan, April 2005
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Fabio Benzi - 2006
Ceramics as Sea Pages
"Sea pages" as the title of one of the most
beautiful ceramic sculptures of the exhibition, could
be the incipit or epigraph of this extraordinary chapter
dedicated to ceramic in the vast volume constituted
by Simona Weller's works.
Made by words and meaningful, allusive, evocative
signs, Simona's painting can be read as a book. According
to the artist, her ceramic work should not be considered
as a minor chapter, for the malleable nature intrinsic
to ceramic can generate a kind of poetry elaborated
with the same sensitivity employed in other media
and surfaces: oil or pastel colors and canvases or
paper respectively. The open curls of the soft and
yet throbbing ceramic emphasize the cerebral movement
of the pictorial writing while the bright colors of
the fluid enamels provide the existential wave of
the sign with an even freer and aerial quality. Moreover,
in ceramic works, forms and colors are perfectly combined
so to reach an apex of formal beauty. Although sea,
wave, sky and wheat fields are the subjects which
the artist explored at length in her former research,
in the ceramics these subjects appear increasingly
more distilled and immediate. They are poetic waves
of the unconscious translated into sign, a sign which
belongs, of course, to a more carefully thought out
artistic process, a testimony of the skill of a profound
and mature artist. Green and blue seas, gloomy sea,
seas interwoven with reflexes, deep seas and seas
in verses: all these watery surfaces cover the wavy
ceramics of Simona Weller, adding a modern freedom
and a joyful character to the fascination of this
ancient medium.
Roma, November 2006
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| Weller Poems for Simona Weller |
Cesare Vivaldi - 1970
Il fuoco per Simona Weller
Complici della luce,
quei sonnacchiosi momenti d'ombra
che si annidano negli angoli in fondo ai corridoi,
rimangono a dormire per pigrizia
mentre pesci dalle gote d'oro
ronzano come api nel bugno dei ceppi
poi si spiegano in volo
correndo via tra le stelle
con gradazioni infinite di colori e di suoni.
Infiltratasi così, in punta di piedi,
l'antica lingua del fuoco
scava nel buio insenature che sembrano fiordi
dove gabbiani lucenti
sorvolano a bassa quota le caravelle del tramonto
e biondeggiano spighe
su campi immaginari.
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Cesare Vivaldi - 1971
Acrostico
Stupefatto, continuo a compitare
l tuo alfabeto. A come azzurro, B come il blu
Marino, C come celeste
Oppure come cielo. Ogni lettera
Nitidamente corrisponde a un colore, a una
cosa
A uno straordinario animale dagli occhi indefinibili.
Wait and see. E come elefante o come
Elmo, I come istrice
La bestia che mi assomiglia, N come nido,
La S chiama il serpente
E via via seguitando con esattezza. Anima,
Ricorda, ha la stessa A di aquila e amore.
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Murilo Mendes - 1973
Per Simona Weller
Plurale e singolare litigano in campo verde blu rosso
violetto.
La lettera U, le generazioni della lettera U.
L'infinita solitudine del punto e virgola, questo
disoccupato.
Linee curve richiamano i ginocchi di Cenerentola,
il dondolio delle isole Varnavlou, le onde dei microfoni
muti.
Il vento ballerino, stanco di turbinare i luoghi previsti,
s'appiatta nei labirinti di Antonin Artaud e nei giardini
semantici di Babilonia.
S'assiste a uno sciopero dei fucili
contemporaneamente a uno sciopero
delle autoblindo.
Un uccello-pirata blu rosso verde dirotta un aereo
al Polo Nord verso la Cometa KBF.
Stelle senza orologio, dimentiche di star
dormendo, si dan del tu urtandosi il gomito.
Un giovane naviglio trasporta poesie clandestine,
sospette ai dittatori.
S'intravvede la carta d'identità dell'uovo
di Colombo.
Lo spazio apre i suoi occhi convergenti e scopre le
manovre del tempo, la sua favola.
Lo scacco del no, la vittoria del sì.
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Cesare
Vivaldi - 1974
A Simona Weller
La scrittura corre veloce verso la fine
della tela, si srotola
e raggomitola in matasse ora fitte
ora rade,
dove si piega l'erba
in un lieve sussurro,
s'arricciano le onde del mare,
dondola lungamente
il grano ingiallito
da un sole che brucia
il nero dei corvi.
La pittura non termina
nei quattro lati del rettangolo del quadro
ma respira aria, spazio,
cuore, cervello, sensi,
si dilata, s'espande
in una catasta d'immagini;
Fenice che accende un rogo
Per poi rinascere dalle sue stesse
ceneri.
La pittura è difficile e semplice come l'amore.
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Adriano Spatola - 1980
L'abilizione della realtà per Simona Weller
La meraviglia il senso degli oggetti laccati
inchiavardati misurati truccati nell'orologio
generosa felice matura penitenza ombra
che il sole sbadato ricuce sulle foglie
calzoni cappelli ombrelli e gonne e guanti
la collera affoga sospirando il gemito risuona
sulla parete decorata e vuota sulla bilancia
gorgo smagliato secco smaltato gorgorismo
congenito alla sete alla cupa stupefazione
o meraviglia o senso degli oggetti laccati.
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Elio Pecora - 1989
Per Simona
Parole che parlano foglie,
nubi, paludi.
Dentro stretti alfabeti
il mare, la morte.
L'a dell'attesa,
l'u dello stupore.
Cuspidi, cerchi, antenne,
segni insensati
per vicinanze, rincorse:
pure qui stanno i richiami,
le soste, gli addii,
per esse un patto remoto,
un ponte esile, arduo,
sopra l'abisso.
E parli, ma dentro una rete
di azzurri-verdi-viola,
di gialli assolati, di rossi:
in essi il grido, il sussurro,
l'annuncio tardo, segreto,
lo scarno saluto, l'inizio
di un mai concluso discorso.
L'occhio si schiude, cancella,
anche s'abbaglia, si curva,
per un diverso alfabeto
che più contiene ed allude.
Così, raccolti i lembi
d'un ritrovato universo,
tu vai segnando una mappa
d'orme chiare, leggere.
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Ariodante Marianni
- 1996
Verdazzurro/acqua/vento/rombo/luce/conchiglia
Sapremo mai che cosa chiedi
In che lingua risponde il tuo
Mare fanciullo mentre trascrivi le sue
Onde compitandole
Nella grafia di chiusi sillabari ed
Atlanti di No-
Where caparbiamente
Esplorando
Le sue variegate correnti con arguta
Leggerezza e molto amando
E affondando nel verdeazzurro/acqua/vento/
Rombo/luce/conchiglia delle tue indocili
tele?
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