Simona Weller
 
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Index   - Mario Ursino - 1991
- Filiberto Menna - 1968   - Angelo Capasso - 1995
- Marcello Venturoli - 1969   - Massimo Bignardi - 2000
- Enrico Crispolti - 1972   - Sandro Barbagallo - 2001
- Federica Di Castro - 1972   - Maria Teresa Benedetti - 2003
- Cesare Vivaldi - 1974   - Paolo Alei - 2005
- Marisa Volpi Orlandini - 1976   - Sandro Barbagallo - 2005
- Luigi Lambertini - 1977   - Alberto Veca - 2005
- Marisa Vescovo - 1978   - Fabio Benzi - 2006
- Elverio Maurizi - 1980   Weller Poems for Simona Weller
- Bruno Lorenzelli - 1981   - Cesare Vivaldi - 1970
- Enrico Cocuccioni - 1983   - Cesare Vivaldi - 1971
- Barbara Tosi - 1983   - Murilo Mendes - 1973
- Palma Bucarelli - 1984   - Cesare Vivaldi - 1974
- Paola Levi Montalcini - 1985   - Adriano Spatola - 1980
- Nanda Vigo - 1985   - Elio Pecora - 1989
- Lorenza Trucchi - 1988   - Ariodante Marianni - 1996
- Antonella Anedda - 1989    









Filippo Menna - 1968

Conversing with Simona Weller

F.M. - First of all, I would like to say that your recent works and the works from a few years ago are strongly consistent in terms of themes and language. The themes are recurrent, and this leads me to believe that you get your inspiration from a well defined environmental context.
S.W. - Of course I do. I in fact believe that living in a natural environment like the countryside, where I live and work, inspires and influences everything I do. It therefore becomes instinctive for me to express myself in a language related to the life cycle as I see it in the countryside: the animals that fight and devour each other to survive, the way they love, the way they die… My eye on nature also gives me a sense of contact with reality which, looked at with the right adjustments, is not very different from what we actually see and breathe in this world.
F.M. - So, what elements of nature are most frequently present on your image repertoire.
S.W. - There was a time in which I was into a pre-natal world made of growing larvae, roots, bulbs, seeds; then, in the following months, this world developed… For example, what excited me the most in the changing of seasons was to find, together with the first crumpled up leaves, the empty shells of snails and crabs, the nymphs or empty skins of the insects, snake sloughs like see-through cortex, or dead toads, dried up in the sun; and even some decomposing flowers looking like animals…
F.M. - Yes, I find that these factors perfectly correspond to the reality of your work, which I would classify within an idea of metamorphosis. In your works, images are never determined, never fixed into a finished and discrete form, but they take up forms that are always different, so I should probably say that your work lives in the idea of cycle: copulation, birth, death, rebirth, so there is, I think, a deep cultural mediation with roots in the far past, and that I would define of alchemic-esoteric nature. Not just violence and death but birth, a strong sense of the cycle of existence.
S.W. - Why not call it vitalism? This feeling life so deeply… I do not agree when you speak of metamorphosis, because I think this word implies a transformation from one form to another, whereas my research is based on an analysis of shapes that modify during their life cycle. I admit that something that's alive is so different from something that's dead to actually give the feeling of a total transformation, almost a metamorphosis. I would also like to object to another word you used (please excuse me): it's the word "alchemic-esoteric", which implies a concept for which I feel a certain suspiciousness and, though it may confer me a suggestive label, it is after all restrictive…
F.M. - I understand and partly share your suspiciousness for labels. It is a bit of a recurring dispute between critics and artists, who generally refuse to be caged in terms that are excessively "closed" and excessively "final": but, on the other hand, I would like to say, more in general, that we always speak within a frame of abstraction and by schemes, just because each word is by itself already a scheme which tries to confine reality in order to share it with others, to communicate.
Therefore, words never have a final character. They are just meant as indications, we shoot to see if we can catch what we are looking for…I agree with you about the fact that the word metamorphosis doesn't perfectly catch the sense of your work because what you are looking for (and you speak of vitalism, which is right, I think) is, rather, a way to develop a sort of organic matrix, in its undifferentiated state, from which anything can originate. Concerning the alchemic-esoteric character, I think that you shouldn't be too suspicious towards such a term because it is just a cultural mediation between you and nature. After all, any reality cannot be observed but through a cultural mediation which makes us part of a certain era, of a certain historical time.
This alchemic-esoteric root is deep rooted in the modern culture that gives origin to your works, i.e. a trend that I would call "organicistic", the trend that fed some of the poetics of surrealism which, from this, have then passed on to the informal domain: I am talking about all the poetics in which the natural element is observed in its undifferentiated matrix state.
In order to place your work in a more precise context, I believe it is appropriate to point out that these themes of death, violence, nature dissolution can take up a precise historical meaning, being the symbol of a wider and more general vital condition.


Naples, November 1968

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Marcello Venturoli - 1969


Simona Weller and the Secrets of Nature

Nowadays, the art situation in terms of techniques is very free, and the peculiarity of a way of painting is not as determining as it was some decades ago; I however believe that Simona Weller's painting should first of all be presented from a technical point of view: it is not essentially graphic work, because the artists uses pastels, oils and enamels in a very measured tone choice; it is not painting - at least if we consider the brush strokes, "placed" on the canvas in a more or less uniform stratification - because the precise encapsulation of shapes as hair signs on drooling white is a peculiarity of the drypoint; it is not etching, not just because each one of Simona Weller's works cannot be repeated, as a unique specimen of these lying prints, but because these charts or maps of nature's charm is conferred mostly by the emerging of a colour rather than by sign inventory, and colour and sign combine, constituting a work of its own.
In Simona Weller's previous exhibitions, I, Filiberto Menna and others already emphasized the artist's autonomous (and slightly counter-current) trend. By taking up forms of neo-liberty, Simona Weller contests informal irrationality; however, instead of turning over to a decorative path, she meditates on rural life and nature, on archaeology and fossils, with a lens-like imagination. The choice of the topics, the constantly stinging and alarmed climate in combining an item with another, or an item, link or explode is not a literary or merely convenient choice: in every detail of her world, we can feel the direct cross-reference to the model and to its environment, we feel that platform of naturalness of painted subjects which only artists who always live with these items have. And this is Simona Weller's case; she can enjoy the entire cycle of seasons from her country house, she can perform daily acknowledgements of the intact landscape, though with the cultivated and refined eye of a city person.
We can say that all the works of this unique painter reflect the amazement, which never became abandonment or, worse, habit, of those who are closely linked to nature, of those who, according to their own culture and imagination, must solve this relationship, which is so elementary in its formulation (nature-culture) and so difficult and risky to find, without having to distort one of the two terms.
In her previous exhibitions, Simona Weller has developed very precise themes and experiences: becoming fond of the evolution of nature as if it were a laboratory survey she had lost the data of, reconstructing it with strokes of imagination; combining fossil findings to pages of ornithology, entomology, anthropomorphic co-protagonist silhouettes. In this second phase (see the exhibition at Galleria Pater in Milan), the human figure indicates the need of a less occasional nature survey, a necessity to emphasize the stories told, putting them in a dialectic frame that is closer to man. This second experience may not have had satisfactory results (as it holds a misunderstanding between figuration and abstraction) but it definitely indicates a problem that gives rise to a survey. In the personal exhibition in Naples, presented by Filiberto Menna, the artist exposes a whole repertoire of approaches to the secrets of nature and matter (from a butterfly's wing, its ramifications, and from these the veins, entering the microscope) repeating her amazements into serial images, an artistic step she also used to focus on this other "agricultural instrument".
This last glorious phase has witnessed the need to not give the same importance to different eras, objects and animals, human things and nature things in a sort of compromise between love and amazement, instead conserving each item's value (as she did in the Naples exhibition) as a redeemed finding in the painting image, relating it to the presence of man, giving this presence a non unrealistic centre, no more in relation to an anthropomorphic way but in relation to a symbolic way.
We here randomly witness insects, roots, bulbs, bone shapes, frogs, seashells, tools, wheels; although, this random order is no more the main (or only) character of the picture; it rather tends to become its background, its scene, while the close up is that of something that is present and vital, useful and necessary to man, a harrow, a fire, as can be seen in the three paintings presented: "Cose del fuoco" ("Fire things"), "Nascita di un solco" ("Birth of a furrow"), "Cose dell'aria" ("Air things"). We already emphasized on the fact that, at the base of the culture and attitude of the artists, there isn't a mere tribute to unconscious in a more or less stated surrealistic way; the concreteness of the analysis, the way of assembling the objects rather trigger our imagination in hyperboles, without considering that surrealism has always had (as a document and never as a catharsis) a pessimistic foundation: in Weller's work instead (and especially in these last works) we feast a vitalistic tension, an authentic enthusiasm for the miracles of nature, in which human presence, its work, its efforts do not seem any less amazing.

Rome, December 1969

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Enrico Crispolti - 1972


Syllabise Reality

It is clearly important to underline that the work developed by Simona Weller in 1971 and 1972 is already in contrast with her earlier paintings, thus introducing in Rome a new writing-painting hypothesis that resembles Novelli's writing-painting, rather than the writing-image of Baruchello.
During the Fifities in Rome, Twombly and Novelli gave birth to the very interesting phenomenon of written-painting: this turned out to be a very unique and original event in the wider horizon of the figurative-writing hypotheses (i.e. Fahlström and Arakawa). In Twombly, this medium revealed a lyrical and autobiographical foundation, an evocative writing made of true conflicting and personal confessions; in Novelli, the medium was objectively dreamlike, including aurorean childish and mythological elements.
I feel that Simona Weller, in a playground made of an objective storytelling of its own kind, brings forth this very last aspect, almost intending to respell the primary aspects of reality. Her works are therefore not visionary, but rather narrative. Although her tales are above all "in potential", figuratively spelling the primary instruments of a possible told plot on daily relationships.
This is why the names and the imagined physical elements of the colours entirely occupy, colour by colour, some of her canvases; and this is why other canvases suggest the reiteration (almost a verification) of the name and of the object, an animal, of an elementary and primary aspect of nature (sea, tree, etc.).
In her most complex paintings, these figurative syllabifications and enumerations, just like a child's drawing, a child's figuring, and just like handwriting in a copybook, form an objective hypothesis for the recovery of a heavenly childish dimension but - and even more so- of a true primordial representation of the essence of figuration and therefore of "narrative description".
Maybe the true story will never be told, probably because it doesn't even relate, in its essence, to Simona Weller. However, her current involvement seems to be preparing speculation (or at least the possibility to speculate) on each element, looking the internal resonance, the particular arrays of a colour of a name, of a notion.

Rome, April 1972

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Enrico Crispolti - 1972


Risillabare la realtà

Forse non sarà improprio avvertire nel lavoro che Simona Weller ha realizzato nel '71 e nel '72, e che è nuovo rispetto alle immediate vicende della sua pittura precedente, un modo di riproporre a Roma un'ipotesi di scrittura-immagine nella maniera della pittura-scrittura di Novelli piuttosto che in quello della scrittura-immagine di Baruchello.
Con Twombly e con Novelli a Roma si è verificata in effetti una vicenda assai notevole di pittura scritta, dallo scorcio degli anni Cinquanta: una vicenda anche che risulta particolare e originale nel più ampio orizzonte di ipotesi appunto di scrittura figurante (da Fahlström ad Arakawa, per intenderci). E che ha un fondamento lirico, e autobiografico, declinato da Twombly in scrittura evocativa di tutta confessione, scontrosa e privata; da Novelli in un oggettivato onirismo, che includeva anche l'utilizzazione di mitologiche aurorali e infantili.
Ora la Weller, su un terreno a suo modo di oggettivato racconto, mi sembra che porti avanti proprio quest'ultimo aspetto, quasi intendendo risillabare da tale base gli aspetti primari della realtà. Non è dunque onirica, piuttosto è direttamente in certo modo narrativa. Anche se il suo racconto è in realtà soprattutto "in nuce", per ora inteso a sillabare figuralmente gli strumenti primari di un possibile svolgimento narrato del rapporto quotidiano.
Per questo i nomi e la fisicità immaginata dei colori occupano interamente, colore per colore alcune sue tele; e così altre suggeriscono la scansione iterativa (quasi accertativa) del nome di un oggetto, di un animale, di un aspetto elementare e primario della natura (mare, albero, ecc.).
Queste sillabazioni ed enumerazioni figurali, come il disegno infantile, e il figurare infantile, e la stessa scrittura da quaderno di scuola, nei dipinti più complessi forma appunto un'oggettivata ipotesi di recupero non tanto di una vera e propria dimensione aurorale e infantile, quanto di una condizione direi "a monte" del figurare, e appunto del figurare narrativamente.
Forse il racconto vero e proprio non verrà mai, perché probabilmente non interessa neppure, nel suo dipanarsi, la Weller. Comunque il suo attuale impegno mi sembra quello in certo modo di prepararlo - o almeno di prepararne la possibilità - speculando su ogni elemento, cercandone le interne risonanze, le gamme particolari, di un colore, di un nome, di una nozione.

Roma, Aprile 1972

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Federica Di Castro - 1972


Exiting Art Infancy

Painting as a means of knowledge. Knowledge of a small, intimate world that can be dilated to a universe. This is what Simona Weller's pages-pictures tell me. Knowledge is the opposite of decoration, but it can integrate it, comprehend it. The world studied by S. Weller is a world of childhood, the pages of a first grade book where handwriting is painting and image is a story, the story of a day, the excitement of a discovery in which sign and colour wonderfully coexist.
Every letter of the alphabet has a colour, just like it has a sound; every word is an image, every sheet has a "tone" determined by all these elements and an emotional echo. In this context, it seems to me that Simona Weller substantially differs from the other artists who, like her, chose to employ a written-painting technique- such as Novelli and Twombly- in that her interest for this very language is an attenuation of that world that uses that expressive medium, rather than being an attenuation of the medium itself. In this specific case, the world of a childhood that discovers its expressive mediums right when it which also discovers that these mediums can be controlled, tameable, but just a second before this happens. Because there is a childish language in unconscious - the language so deeply investigated by Klee-, a completely intuitive language filled with significant stratifications: the magical uncontrolled world close to limbo, to the buried civilizations which characterizes the drawings of two-three-four year old children.
Simona Weller's attention is instead very precise and it is focused on the moment in which we say farewell to limbo, to conquer the reason of knowledge; to reach, with time and after a long path, passing through a different side of that ancient world, that mystery of the source.
The discovery of the medium, the discovery of the language, of the reference points which are the same for everyone, the discovery of an unsuspected objectivity that belongs to us all: it is what the first pages of our childhood notebooks tell us when we look at them in amazement. Then the mediums become familiar and our time becomes a dispenser of mediums, of many mediums of expression and acquisition.
The artist's problem is the medium, meaning that the artist always fears lack of authenticity, he doesn't trust the medium, he almost cannot believe that that is his/her medium. Because languages are available to everyone and it is hard to recognize the one that really belongs to us.
Simona Weller's story hits the world of creativity in a very wide sense, it extends to the relationship between the artist and his/her language, more than between the artist and his/her work or between the artist and his/her public. It opens the way to thought about the relationships between the emotional world and the expressive world, it leads to considerations on the value of choice. Beyond the page of a notebook, where the image acquires an audible meaning and where it is filled with dramatic features and sweetness and anger and joy and seasons and light and day hours, beyond the childish freshness that Weller's painting gives us back, intact, there is a series of issues that penetrate the intimate but dilatable world of creativity, in its most tangled knot; the knot that prevents matter from entering the world of awareness; the most intense moment, the moment in which the artist steps out of the childhood of art.

Rome, April 1972

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Cesare Vivaldi - 1974


Simona Weller's Chromatic Variations

Simona Weller now has had a quite long painting history, considering that she has been exhibiting since 1959 with an evolution that brought her to refine her expressive mediums to the maximum; the sign-colour intended as writing, giving up -as time goes by- any foreign element that isn't relevant in her language: a language filled up with echoes and semantic relevance, soaked with lights and snows and dawns, but which only lives by itself and for itself and just is, in the analysis that the artist makes by using it, the only object and substance of the painting.
After her debut as a teenager, Simona Weller has for years carried out thin surveys in a neo-informal domain, whose aim was to especially study what I could define "chance's writings"; footsteps, traces, trails and their relationships with the primary elements (water, earth, air, fire) on which and in which they were written.
In 1970 and, more strongly, in 1971, her attention turned to the world of childhood, to handwriting and to childish drawing and it is since this very moment that her art definitely undertook the character of a very original written-painting, which can though be inserted (as I was noting back then and as stated by Enrico Crispolti in 1972 when he presented Simona Weller's exhibition in Rome) in the recent roman tradition of Twombly and Novelli.
The following step, dating back to 1973 and 1974, was the rejection of any pretext (the childhood world, indeed) which may deviate the artist's interest from a writing intended as a sign-chromatic "ductus" in which the ancient primary elements, drastically reduced to a simple light-matter dialectics, come back, transformed into "continuums" of words stubbornly spelled and respelled through new chromatic variations and new space-time inventions.
For Weller's current work we could certainly speak about "new painting", to use a terminology that is trendy and not exact, as it is applicable to too many heterogeneous personalities. Personally, I prefer to relate her original written-painting to that neo-informal area that is quite interestingly extending to the international level and which might also include Ryman himself, together with Twombly, not to speak of Dorazio's late works. An informal art (and please forgive the generic word used) seen with an informal eye that pays attention to the the problems that exclusively pertain to painting even technique, refusing the existential anguish and the exasperated egotism of "gesture".

Rome, October 1974

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Marisa Volpi Orlandini - 1976


Simona Weller and the Continuous Discovery of Pictorial Immagination

In Simona Weller's most recent paintings, which are horizontal canvases heavily impregnated with variations of colour on colour, a repeated rectangular tessera appears to structure the painting rhythmically. A structure that Simona refers to Mondrian in her dedications. Naturally it is the Mondrian who he passed from a realistic and expressive period to a more critical and thoughtful one; the period when he painted the woods at Oele, the windmills, the hats, and when he used the divisionist tache of fauve colour, as if a grid, or structure. This a process of disenchantment that Mondrian, mystic and idealist, will never stop, except in his noted abstract paintings of horizontally and vertically divided surfaces.
Various decades have passed from when abstract painting emerged and Simona Weller's experiences begin when the an already totally decodified situation. Her first starting point was the handwriting of children, and the poetry of a totally uncertain page, imitated in the pure desire to sketch typical of the child. After the transposition of the poetic in the visual, and the visual in the poetic, the painter arrives at a pictorially much more important phase, when her horizontal lines of handwriting impaginate a composition already gridded with vertical lines of regular paint drippings. The way in which Simona Weller paints is simple, but very articulated; she prepares the background of the canvas with tempera, then she traces her handwriting in crayon, and then for the lines which over-lay the work she uses a large brush to reinforce the visual horizontal theme.
The various phases: preparation, design, writing, daubing, dripping, then writing again are overlaid and merge together but in such a way as to leave the individual processes legible. The result is a "constructive" texture that belongs to the rhythmical tradition of the coloured paintings of Van Gogh's last period, or in those of Seurat, Monet, Dorazio - even more than the expressive graphics of the informal American school or of Twombly.
However, we have not, hitherto, referred to the lyrical motivation of this painter, who as a woman, confides in these with assurance. The relationship I-nature, I-unconscious, often excluded or left neglected, is instead chosen with enthusiasm by Weller. It is sufficient to think of titles like Turquoise vibrations on the word sea, Dawn, Grass-Homage to Seurat, Ochre variations on the word wave, where the words grass, dawn, sea, wave, have a magical character. In fact, communication is based on, not the word wave, but by the real sensation given by a wave or by the sea or by the dawn. The subtle play is between the title that announces a semantic origin in a literary sense, and the painting that alludes physically to Nature; a nature towards which the painter seems to be drawn with a passion. Nature and the countryside reveal their symbolic essence as other than themselves, the universe, the unknown, the unconscious, in infinite changes of colour, from beauty to desolation.
It is symptomatic that the aspect of abstract painting derived from the impressionism has been hidden by the puritanical intentions of historical avant-gardes, particularly by Constructionism, by the Bauhaus and its followers, who all tried to formulate the problem of modern style; and thus they tried in every way to eliminate the individual's relationship with his perception of himself and with the world. This relationship has become ever more embarrassing from the seventeenth century onwards.
The rules and teaching laid down, with great care, from the period of the intuitive discoveries of the impressionists, have relegated to the sidelines personal sensitivity that had been at the centre of the impressionist movement - suffice to think of the apotheosis of Monet. It is not entirely casual that this "individual relationship with oneself and art" has re-emerged in the last four or five years after various attempts to put it to the side. Polarisations of this romantic and "Schopenhauer like" feeling have been seen within the Informal Movement from Pollock to Burri, and obviously have never been disappeared.
However, it would now appear that the crisis of society has reached the point of releasing us from rational and constructive pressures, and the individual's relationship with his innermost feelings becomes completely free; free to make one's own codification language. This is found not only in painting, but also in any artistic performance.
In Simona Weller's painting Violet variations on the word sea, she is really declaring her act of faith in contact with nature, with the force that surrounds the individual and substantiates him.
Linguistically speaking, her personal culture is certainly related to the formal tradition of colour from the Post-impressionists to Dorazio (formal and not formalistic). On the other hand, the vibrant note that I find present and still vaguely seeking a solution is her romantic explicitation and thus a painting such as "Dawn", one of those which I prefer, makes me think of an allusion to certain landscapes of Friedrich. And it is in this female (and romantic) side of our modern culture that I find extraordinary in Simona Weller the continuing discover of herself in reflection and pictorial imagination.

Rome, February 1976

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Luigi Lambertini - 1977


Simona Weller: a Path Toward the Unconscious

We shouldn't get carried away by memories, by the amazement of the past. It might ruin the objectiveness of the story. When an image triggers the trap of memory, it immediately releases some sort of sympathy and personal participation. Nevertheless, as far as I am concerned, in Simona Weller's paintings I cannot do otherwise, and this goes beyond any critical issue and any thought on language, beyond any consideration on her work's position within our modern times, which are so uncertain, so dramatically tense and contradictory. I find myself fully involved, confused by different feelings. At first I was reluctant to confess it, but then, thinking about it, I realized that it was unfair to not tell, because what I was hiding would have immediately come out to the eyes of a careful reader. And that's not all.
We should, once for all, wonder whether or not it's appropriate to face things naturally and sincerely. Someone may though object that what Simona Weller's painting suggests to me is just the result of my private experience, of issues that belong to me only. Well, Sir, that may be true but only up to a certain point! And here, just for you, I have a thought that dates back to many years ago, but which is still very true. In an unfinished posthumous essay named "Philosophical Art", Baudelaire states that "every good sculpture, every good painting, every good music suggests the feelings and the thoughts it is meant to suggest".
Well, Simona Weller's work is soaked with a sea air, with the echoes of far away voices, not yet covered by the noises of a highway, but just scattered out like sudden kids' yells, disturbed by some call - a name shouted from a window- which then fades while refracting its own echo; then the backwash dominates again, re-launching, almost in flights, the salty taste, the smell of the nets, of the seashells and of the cuttlebones in the sun.
It is a return to an ever-present childhood- and we will later explain the concept-; a return to "now", today just like yesterday. And with this return, many more vibrations, suggestions, silences between the palm trees and the pine trees overlooking the sea, in the pathways of lime homes, between the deserted gardens of (apparently) isolated villas, and the waiting of youth, of a season in which everything - images, sounds, smells and encounters- tastes like a dreamt reality which must come true, which is the desire of something that is developing and growing within us.
And then the light which dazzles, splitting the palm trees' fans, falling on the stork's bills and stealing their perfume, on the agaves and on the rose-bay, maybe in a small slumbering train station… and it is not just a physical fact. It is much more than that, and very different. Nature thus becomes feeling and sense, sensation and happening; it becomes a character, just like each one of us is or was and, at the same time, it becomes a fair copy notebook on which we are about to write, watching that we do not fold the margins of the page and that we do not stain or smudge the last word.
It is childhood or youth, coming back with their fragrance, their naivety , their dreams and their dramas, though often very small. The hand runs slowly on the paper and word take up their own shape: sea (written with the rhythm of the waves); waves (the same way) and then grass, sky and much more.
A childhood that was lost just like paradise, a childhood that we take with us and that we look for. And it's not a game or an artifice. We must be clear, ready to catch the glimpses of memory of a second that isn't now, but which now emerges, recalled, evoked; looking within ourselves, transferring (with a simultaneity that is sense and feeling) today's reality in yesterday's reality by using some autobiography, just as much as necessary to write pages addressed to others as well.
Therefore, the enchantment of colour, page after page, seems to widen up, to catch us and contaminate us, it seems to make us part of a happening and of another and another, wrapping us up in a slight "spleen". A page therefore immediately changes to another by overlapping; the light filters through the colours in a slanted fashion and colour becomes light -though, actually, it was light already-; sign and word transform to reference points, to obstacles that are only apparent, and we immediately realize that they are catch and pause areas from which the eye can move to continue its path, to see what has already been seen and to recreate it once more.
Writing, sign and their value; a very unique value. Writing and sign, handwriting and short background made of brush strokes, which, one next to the other, are mystery and revelation in the expression of a world born of childhood and youth; they are colour, rhythm, cadenza, pause, overlapping, sequence, tone, voice and attenuation.
But all of this would be incomplete, or rather, it would be partial, if, in Simona Weller's work, we didn't consider- together with this courage of being in nature and in reality, translated not only into a pure call of atmospheres and colours- the contemporary implication and that kind of considerations on those instruments that culture has provided us with and that Simona managed to capture in her personal exploration. For the past, we have recalled the colours of the late Van Gogh and some Divisionist cadences (the recurring names are those of Seurat and Monet) and then we focused on the value of writing and sign, until we mentioned Twombly. Plus, when Weller composed her paintings with a series of dowels from which colour dripped, somebody mentioned the name of Mondrian, the dunes, nature's transition phase, the transition phase of reality towards its mystical invention of absolute and concrete equilibrium. And this is right, if we consider it with the due caution and without declutching.
I in fact do not believe that Simona Weller's reality can be restricted, without further explanation, within predefined limits; it cannot be, as we say today, "coded". Hers is mainly a human attitude, the attitude of a person that looks around consciously and with a critical eye, of a person who also considers what the past has brought to her, but especially of a person able to look inside herself. Her journey is therefore sentimental, but only up to a certain point. It is the result of a survey that allows something completely different to emerge. Her thoughts on the language of painting, on language and on painting and on painting as a language is, in other words, the element used to express herself and to existentially define her own reality and to come out of it at the same time.
It is therefore an introspection and a path within her unconscious, operated with aware attention, but also with slight participation. And that's not all.
If there is a handwritten sign that becomes something else while suggesting a word, which is in itself already image and vice versa, if there is a colour that once for its shades and another time for its tones lets us into a dimension that, though staying as it is, still bears the condition for becoming something else, if all this exists, then we have to highlight a simultaneity both on an aesthetic level as well as on a psychological level. It is a simultaneity that corresponds to a mirror, to the refraction of images and situations, it is a simultaneity that corresponds to a kaleidoscope that projects us into an iridescent game of pages that are quiet at one point and melancholically dreamy at some other point, dark at one point and ironic at another.
Pages that are though always revealing, mysterious and present.

Rome, January 1977

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Marisa Vescovo - 1978


The Sign-Symbol of Simona Weller

After the important inventions introduced by the historical avant-gardes, one must return to the humility of rediscovery, reducing the emphasis and communication between the minimal excesses of the current pictorial and situational grammar, to think about the linguistic elements involved and their use as construction elements. A woman artist, in particular, feels compelled to create different relationships with society, a way of giving order to gesture and to materials, and to the space to be filled.
Analysing the art system means to accept colour as an osmotic membrane underlining the autonomy and reality of the "whole" which, at the same time, is composed of the object and its surface, matter and chromatics, which occupy and integrate space, underlining the organisational rules of basic elements; it also means to underline the most simple linguistic elements, in order to analyse the creation as related to the work's system, which again should be perceived in its twofold nature relating to nature and culture. On the other hand, we -like Cassirer- are more and more aware that we are surrounded by a process of ever growing symbolisation. Our world is a universe made of signs and symbols in which every shape, word or gesture can be exemplified, allowing us to believe, above and below their pathways, that they are references to a behavioural pattern going beyond the work of art itself. The symbol's function is to clarify the need to understand things; it indicates a place, an event or even a pathway, a physical space and track, used during our daily encounters, before which we can observe the appearance of a phenomenon of apparent indifference or of emotional-repulsive motions.
These are the real reasons why we believe Simona Weller is searching to uncover, with the greatest concentration and the slightest effort, the fragments of the unexpected stratifications of images deposited in her own deepest being; a search whose pulsations and emotions are conjugated with feminine suffixes, almost as if this were to become the beginning of an affirmative discussion and a severely highlighted dialogue in which reality is acknowledged and rediscovery shown as if it were emerging from a forgotten, unresolved situation in the middle of unequal floating, volatile and contradictory signs. There is certainly an entry or a return - we don't know which - to a consistency of colour, memories, and dreams caught while they develop, all through the use of a series of symbols, of a happy and fecund naturalness that needs no interpretation or explanation but must just be there, to deny, again, an intimate and personal history of silences, denial, censorship, of absurd and alienating removal processes.
In Weller's most recent works there appears to be a clear, pressing need to clarify the elements seen in her previous works, in order to continue to live and meditate about the perception of a closed situation, so that the symbols moving across the canvasses with small scores, underscoring, weft and weaving, continuous and discontinuous, allow us to perceive a protracted explosion from the preceding nucleus of her writing, which disseminates itself and proceeds horizontally towards the abyss of an alchemic transmutation, wherein the viewer sees him/herself as an abbreviated vibrating, pictorial and graphical signal. Here is a creation somewhere between the diary-like impulse to write (using the physiology of the symbol itself) and a sign filled with chromatic vibrations but which, at the same time, is never abstract or automatic; an encounter marked by various levels of experience and analogies.
This decisive crossroad is found at this point of her work, on paper and on velvet. In fact, the sign used to control space narrates, as always, a pathway, and this sign appears to be a measurable element, instant, elementary, obsessive yet free, an emotional, innocent adventure as if born in infancy, yet bearing intellectual depth and vision. It is therefore essential to find a system in which emptiness and fullness can be arranged. The sign/symbol adopts a mechanism using continuous repetition, not as a finished gesture but as a variable tensor, moving and following emotional and rational behaviour patterns. In this way, the perceptive means is clear and one comprehends an operation where arrows are shot at absolute and symbolic values, above all tones, light, and colours, above and below, move in an optical play towards an intense and dynamic conquest of space where one sees the gradual alignment of a series of pins imitating the unending routines of daily life. The repeated use of this mentally controlled dripping is undertaken with no attention to the borders of the surface, and the dripping moves towards them, as if searching for a relationship between the work and what takes place in the area beyond it. The paper or velvet receive the simplest of signals; a dotted line from which minimal pulsations are underlined, together with imperceptible levels of sensitivity, thereby producing an operation in which sign and concept coincide and become the framework of a long descent into the unconscious, moving into remote memories in which hesitation and knowledge mix in a simultaneous movement of bergsonian length, continuing in the present and going towards the future.
The sign invades the surrounding space, confirming its continuation through time, not just as a straight line moving towards a central arrival point, but with a series of movements indicating repetitions, sliding, interruptions, always in a two dimensional state, soft yet thick. Everything is channelled towards an ever-changing transformation, richer, more complicated, dilated beyond any pre-planned structure and, therefore, far from the boring label usually given to optical art. The points proceeding in a never-ending series, are not part of a traced line representing pre-planned or pragmatically imposed gestures, but they appear to be the record of something living, moving or open to an afterwards. The keys for breaking the code of these messages are not given because we are dealing with symbols/signs, a series of symptoms that refer to something that is happening or that is being consumed in the motion of relativity -which is the only absolute we have left- as a possibility to be "here" and "now".
The instinctive automation of the gesture - where gesture is a means with intrinsic qualities of an organic nature, tied to subconscious- belongs to a humanistic culture whose roots developed way beneath the Italian tradition, that moves from tones to timbres and expresses itself in the gargoyles of a language given back in a signal-visual form, capable of receiving inspiration and breath from the sea, water, sunshine and from the clear air of a country morning.
Nature, celebrated in this way, is dissected into little pieces down to its simplest elements, in order to recreate syntax that lies at the origin of all semantic painting, interspersed with rhythms echoed in those often seen on the walls of the Ravenna basilicas. The colour impulses are always closely linked to writing, to the signs produced, while the use of white strengthens, like light, the neuralgic centres of the vibrating fabric. Luminosity arrives mysteriously on the opaque black of the background. The minute figures that appear, measured carefully by a hand that draws and an eye that guides, are no longer within space but become space and represent the last frontier of the Illusionism of Modern painting.
The point or dot therefore becomes chromatic quantity, capable of suggesting continuity, creating the fullness and the emptiness of a conscience; a consciousness that is not the opposite of unconscious, but which is capable of living with the conscious and unconscious at the same time, reality received in a visual blow up.
The most recent paintings by Weller are able to create themselves within the chromatics used, in a process that is in time capable of expressing the contradictions of painting, its meaningful actions, its history, which today, more than ever before, places us in front of the pulsations rising from a profound structure.
The artist, although never overcome by her private phantoms, has used a certain nocturnal element within her imagination, permitting a vision of her ongoing race towards the apex of her symbols - for example the Sea and the Wave, a liquid element, giver of life, therefore feminine-: both are typical of the European habitat, wherein they are traditional linguistic elements narrating themselves ambiguously, guided by a metaphor, to which we owe much, not only for the persistence of memories, but for its still unbroken and liberating aim.

Rome, January 1978

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Elverio Maurizi - 1980


Simona Weller: Painting with Words

"Painting with words" is for Simona Weller not merely an aphorism, it is, in fact, the exact explanation of how an intellectual situation is translated into reality; it is the cross reference to a series of backwashes which, apart from all the possible historical precedents (for example Apollinaire, Futurism, Dadaism) propose covert or indirect references by means of an almost symbiotic co-habitation of a series of words with the images they suggest. This kind of communication appears, therefore, to be somewhat ambiguous and provoking because it suggests a temporary relationship between two different dimensions - one verbal (and therefore synthetic) and the other figurative (and therefore analytic), in which however it is not necessarily the linguistic structure, which prevails upon the literary elements, involved.
Without referring to psychoanalytical myths (that in any case are typical of so much of this period's critical work), I believe that an analysis of this young painter's work must be attempted by means of a much simpler method - in other words, it is necessary to return to the moment when "words" and "painting" become "one" in her imagination and where her force of perception gives life to an original psychological germ, and transforms this into a basis for discussion and confrontation. One could even hypothesize that there is a direct connection between the darkest and deepest recesses of those half hidden ferments of the mind (memories long forgotten or an archaic childhood) of real attempts to rediscover a world where fantasy and reality are one.
At the same time, a purely historical approach (which I prefer) would appear to be indicated for a style of painting which, while describing ordinary and metaphorical themes, sees these quite clearly as essential emblems of "Being".
This research automatically leads us to an analysis of the artist's earlier investigations, that is to say of those vaguely surreal elements that have been constant in her work for many years and that follow the pathway traced by Ernst-Matta-Sutherland (pathway accurately described by Cesare Vivaldi1). In fact, Weller's re-elaboration of data from the real world into re-proposals by means of symbols and allusions, through syntheses and extrapolations, remains her unique constant, which today, too, seems to characterize her work.
The magical significance enclosed within her spelling of her pictorial language is the dominating factor of her work, covering everything with a nostalgic desire for simplicity, a desire that becomes slowly visible not just with one's imagination but in a more tangible way, in a way that catalyses the signs of Nature and marks the cycle of Life. If knowledge is the means whereby each man underlines - in a given historical moment - the problem of existence and of becoming, then Simona Weller, with a sympathetic method (sympathy used in the Greek sense, i.e. concord, harmony, or "to feel with") demonstrates how the mediation of her traced line does not resolve, sic et simpliciter, the need to illustrate totally the entire significance of one's art, but rather suggests the necessity to investigate the use and function of significance. The artist must therefore follow a practical and mental process in which - through more or less obvious semantic connections - text and imagery solicit the use of a language, which is closely tied to the most secret recesses, and motivations of his/her creativity.
When Federica Di Castro states that in these pictures "words" have been transformed into "a harmonic amalgam of rhythms, signs, signals, transcriptions, errors, and memory", or even more simply, into "a projection of the soul into canvas" she is, in effect, underlining how the reference points - orthographic or not - multiply their incidence and are capable of highlighting the sentimental and instinctive aspects of the work. Reflections from various cultural influences - ranging from post-impressionistic colours3 to systematic organisation of the contents4 and to a profound introspection5 attract the observer to an apparently romantic atmosphere in which the intensity of communication is conveyed by means of the subtle and penetrating balance between colours and lines.
Various urgent problems arise when we observe the recent production of this painter, not the least of these is that of the use of a compositional freedom which now appears in many aspects of her work; these are never incoherent in the eurhythmic development used and these aspects appear to determine the tempo of the reading and to solicit (as if this were essential) the pauses and reflections that arise from this. It is sufficient to understand how the warp and weave of her lines move, in order to understand the secret connections between her thoughts, the grammatical and syntactical notes, that network which forces the primeval elements into a free-play context within a continuum in space and time, fascinating and provocative at the same time.
A full -and occasionally solemn- breath emerges symmetrically with the growth and development of the colours on the canvas, and this breath moves them in different ways and forces them to impress a sinuous line, full of dramatic content.
Tommaso Trini6 is quite correct when he observes how Weller's "writing in colours" overlaps between the "horizontal rhythms of a speckled grid" and that this is necessary in order to exalt "the sensitive tones of her relationship with Nature". Nevertheless, I think it is important to point out how the use of the "lemma", transformed from concept into line, brings us to an harmonic destructuring of the word, which though will continue to exist as a loudspeaker for psychological vibrations, whose evocative powers leave the observer with a need to make considerations upon the multiple explicit and implicit implications contained in Weller's works.
I do not think that Weller's chromatic pulsations are declined in a "feminine way", as held by Marisa Vescovo7. If, however, with this "expression" she intended to imply a certain kind of sensitivity, a happy gracefulness of imagination, and an individual system of organisation that brings into the foreground the almost musical nature of Weller's paintings, and a similar "expression" to describe the transfer of certain intimate thoughts into intellectual expressions, thoughts and tensions which convey simple linguistic units with a feminine quality, then I could agree with the definition as such, because in this way Weller transfers an ideological and cultural privacy onto canvas, finalizing certain logical and iconoclastical connotations, whose verbal-visual representations are in fact the central core of her artistic discourse.
Ten years of painting, from 1970 to 1979, represent a long period that, at the same time, is quite sufficient to clarify the motivations that have guided this Roman born artist towards a continuous refinement of the instruments for her individual style of painting.
In Dieci Anni (Ten Years), painted in 1970, a hypothetical free space is left to develop in much the same way as a school copybook would, and is rich with transitional densities that change according to the unchangeable rules of a primordial systematic reasoning.
In Ciao, burattino (Hi, puppet) of 1971, the structure would appear to support a phoneme that is only slightly reinforced by a characterisation of the design that underlines the difference between reading and seeing.
In Con la parola erba (With the word grass) of 1972, thanks to a rhythmic superimposition of a series of letters, the writing space opens up a large figurative area, whose breadth clamours for visual independence. Again, in Tessitura per la parola erba (Weaving with the word grass) distinctive tracts would appear to be necessary in order to underline the subordinate personality of the written word in relation to the "de-semantication" of words. Here, the progressively mutual inter-relationships of the linguistic and the pictorial codes become complementary to each other within the central theme of intellectual contents. In canvasses such as Un campo di grano con volo di corvi (A wheat field with flying crows) the graphics used would appear to be all absorbing were it not for the fact that the words are almost completely disarticulated and from this "decompositional" style a process of communication is born. The same phenomenon is found in other works of this period, and the following years, where the linguistic space, (apparently overtaken by the disappearance of the words) would still appear to be the essential structure. This structure is created with the use of paint-smudges, and the rhythm between these facilitates the vision of a multitude of chromatic tones and of the disintegration of colour to create meaningful refrains whose meaning would otherwise stay hidden.
Tessere un mare viola (To weave a Violet Sea) transforms the text into real graphic warps and weaves and demonstrates that the technique used to "decompose" is as important as the composition of the writing itself.
This present analysis would be incomplete without an observation on the developments discovered in later works. Of particular interest is Parole controluce (Words against the light) a mixed technique in collage and tempera on paper (1979), and part of the even larger work Diario al muro (Diary on the wall) in which certain almost plastic elements are involved.
Un colore per ogni ora (A colour for every Hour), also from 1979, uses pigment as a graphic element, in imitation of language that goes beyond conventionality in the use of line and sign and is a rather conceptual research carried to extremes, whose and echoes are also found in Quando in Primavera (When in Spring) or in the two pastel and tempera works (also from 1979) Vento nell'erba (Wind in the Grass) and Fuoco nell'erba (Fire in the Grass).
The most interesting discoveries are to be found in the artists most recent work; for example in L'abolizione della realtà (Abolition of Reality) because of the pleasant interchange of artistic enunciations and of the nostalgic quality assumed by the painting, a reality that forces the observer to think about the physical nature of intention which has developed from the original reality of a mental process.
In describing her recent research in a recent letter8, Simona Weller talks of the "return of figurative elements", of "readable letters alternated with undeciphered words", of "threads of images that grow into words", and of "words that change into threads of imagination", of "a sort of coded cipher of the unconscious mind", whose archetypes are attracted by "great paintings" and by "great poetry". It is not easy to decipher the ambiguity hidden in these works, but it would appear legitimate to ask ourselves if any critical knowledge could define the limits of any system, reducing creativity to a mere longing for things of the past, to suggestions for how one could read, to the necessary interpretation of a poetry which goes beyond simple appearance, to observe and understand not only the architectonic or compositional values but, above all, an the musical and pictorial possibilities.
Roland Barthes10 writes that "an image on its own does not by itself invent imagination, but imagination cannot be described without that image, even if it's a small and lonely image".
In her extrapolations, Simona Weller uses a grammar made up of elementary signs and colours, which gives the due support to an eloquent and see-through way of communicating, whose ductility brings to life the formality required in a painting and, even more than that, shows us a personal style of writing that seems to bridge the gap between painting and literature. As Oscar Wilde observed in the preface to The Portrait of Dorian Gray the chosen are those "to whom beautiful things mean only beauty".
For those of us who, like you and me, were born in more tragic times, these "beautiful things" have assumed an existential importance, a final, extreme vision of the "art-life" principle, - i.e. a fact that binds together illusion and reality. Instead, for the young Roman painter, "these things" are a luminous affirmation, a liberating analysis, a personal contribution to life in this society.

Macerata, May 1980

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Bruno Lorenzelli - 1981


Conversing with Simona Weller

B.L. - As a born and bred Roman artist, how do you explain the fact that most of Italian critical writing is centred on Rome?
S.W. - That is a question I have often been asked in Milan, and with malice aforethought I think. The people who ask the question may know the answer already and they may be looking for confirmation of their love-hate feelings about Rome. The idea that needs confirmation is that we are all dissatisfied with the behaviour of the critical establishment, and we are all dissatisfied whit the political establishment. And since the political and the critical establishments both live and work in the same city, there must be some connection between the two. Of course there is, it is obvious, but some people may like to hear it again. A well-known politician remarked that "power wears down those who don't have it", and that might serve as the motto of the Roman critics. Everything Milan thinks about Rome is true. It is true that Rome is corrupt, that culture is run by under-secretaries, that there is greed and historical short-sightedness. It is true that the critics are bureaucrats, careerists, and paranoids. Lea Vergine said that "in Rome gossip becomes scandal", and I think she is right.
B.L. - How do you explain the "love" that this "whorish" city evokes?
S.W. - I think it is latent in everyone who lives "outside" Rome, and it may have ancient roots in a collective unconscious that includes both the Roman Empire and the caricature of that empire created by Fascism. And then, this damned city is damned beautiful, full of colour, imagination, joie de vivre, people of every race... you see... every sort of thing happens here, every day, it's as if we were always in a state of shock. But those vivid green Mediterranean pines outlined against a fine cloudless sky... they're not just "what I see from my studio window"; they're a consoling image of a visual culture that I am part of... After Balla, after Severini, after Boccioni, after Mafai and Raphaël, after Caporossi, Dorazio and Accardi… Why don't you ask me why even De Chirico came back to Rome to die?
B.L. - If this city is so seductive after all, why are you Roman artists so worried about the success of the younger generation of painters? Can they "lay on the paint" better than you do?
S.W. - If they knew how to "lay on the paint" better, as you put it, then I think we would clench our teeth and humbly watch them take their places in the arena… But to go back to the short-sightedness of the critics in Rome, which is where it all starts, they take over the media as if they were launching a new brand of soap; there hasn't been anything like it in the past twenty years. The trouble is that they are inflating personalities that don't have enough breath to climb the stairs home… Do you remember the fashion for being "political"? The same that happened in public schools in 1968, (with prizes going for mediocrity, crudeness, and lack of ability) is now happening to the art world too… But there is a substantial difference. While indiscriminate acculturation was "political", the recruiting of mediocre artists to create a "new situation" seems like a plague. Once again it is the "monsters" that make the news.
B.L. - If the atmosphere in Rome is degraded, if there is no market for art, and if intelligent and attentive criticism is lacking, how can artists live there, and how can they work?
S.W. - Sometimes I think we're either giants or masochists. Even though the Rome National Gallery of Modern Art does not have any important De Chirico or any important Futurist paintings, there are many in New York and many people go to look at them. And I think that these midgets who are trying to pass off their grotesque impotence (like vaudeville comics) as serious, creative artistic work will get their just deserts from history (although museums teach us that no trace of them will remain). They will get what they deserve, like all the nameless "turds" who have always pretended they never knew who was living just upstairs… and it might have been Balla.
B.L. - And you?
S.W. - You may laugh, but I reserve the right to paint well, to be free to explore beauty as much as I like, without accusing fingers pointed at me, the way they do in Italy.

Milan, March 1981

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Enrico Cocuccioni - 1983


Conversing with Simona Weller

E.C. - It seems to me that your present work represents a moment of synthesis and survey. Maybe we are getting close to a turning-point…
S.W. - Yes, right now I am actually using all my symbols. "Mine", because I take them from my unconscious, from my experiences, from my culture. This exhibition is called "A sign is the specimen spoken", from a phrase by Gertrude Stein, writer and theorist of cubism. Other sentences of hers also inspired the paintings' titles. These sentences seem evocative, magical, perfect for that I want to paint: "called, each thing shivers a bit…".
E.C. - Do you agree about the turning-point part?
S.W. - Certainly, I am conscious that "I sought, and now I have found" and I like it that you mentioned synthesis. I feel that my work, which is so dense and rich with quotations, is like a river (just like a painting, just like life) in which I have learned to swim. But, as Picasso used to say, I consider painting as a self-therapy; so I would say that I do it especially for myself. Of course, it can also help others by releasing particular echoes or identification possibilities; and this obviously makes me happy. Just like a writer is happy to touch the reader's sensitivity, it excites me to add an eye to another person's sensitivity.
E.C. - Do you think you have reached a creative maturity?
S.W. - I hope so; I believe that a painter's maturity is revealed when his/her control of the human and pictorial mediums becomes one with "creation" (which does not have anything to do with the more general term "creativity").
E.C. - So you believe there is a difference between creativity and creation?
S.W. - Perhaps they are just as different as the critic and the artist... Anyone who uses imagination and talent, intuition and curiosity to enrich his/her life and to love his/her work can be considered creative. The creation process is instead a very, very long and patient search, similar to scientific research, which can proceed by steps, revolutions, inventions, but which only becomes "useful" if it manages to make an apparently dried up branch blossom again, or if it generates a new tree from a little scion. And by tree, I metaphorically mean the great oak named Art, which survives since centuries.
E.C. - Is it then possible to find a critical criterion to diversify expression in general from art in particular?
S.W. - We could probably come very close to this if we tried to identify the various phases of the very delicate process that leads to creation. For instance, think of how natural it is to consider inspiration the process's first phase! I agree with Severini who says that "we must be ready, in order to receive inspiration!". Behind inspiration lies a clot of data, facts, information, a decantation of emotions which only spring out at a certain moment. And this moment is already a second phase, while a third phase could be that imponderable gear which, maybe for an association of ideas, makes you predict the exact result in the composition of a work (which in fact could never be any different from what it is...). A fourth phase certainly concerns the courage -or the need- to compare the work with the outside world, in order to expose the results to others... And we can even point out a fifth phase, which concerns the sphere of feelings; because we need a firmness, a tenaciousness, a strength that are not common, to believe in our work in spite of the trends, of the cultural terrorism, of the obedience to the power and (let's say it, at least once!) despite the fact of being a woman.
E.C. - Speaking of trends, today we can observe a triumph of a sort of "painting pornography"; what is your opinion about this pressing overlapping of the Image over a less gaudy horizontal dimension, which is though more critical and constructive?
S.W. - I think that the artistic event can contain various coexisting factors, even though we continuously witness a sectarian separatist attitude -be it because of commercial strategies or due to political events- which certainly does not favour a fertile circulation of ideas. However, even the most different tendencies have often gone along parallel lines. Also, history has demonstrated that conformists have often auto-sponged themselves out, while the more original personalities have managed to prove themselves right; and not even with so much delay... Abnormal phenomena like the one you called Pornography of Image are the logical consequence of the abuse of "trends and fashion". No one has yet had the courage to say that yawning can lead to jaw dislocation, therefore, for the moment, we can just keep the monsters we deserve....

*******

S.W. - Why do you think that my work contains an optimistic and positive component "in spite of all"?
E.C. - Firstly, I still feel that your work contains a constructive effort, a structural tension that, at least partly, is aligned to the operational line of modern art, whose linguistic models and experimental aesthetics seem today to be going through a crisis. You yourself evoked the crisis of project and of ideology, when you spoke about a phase that is no more based on "research" but which instead expressly refers to Picasso's "I don't seek, I find" concept. Furthermore, because the idea of "self-therapy" allows you to find a new centre, to reach a synthesis, to self-motivate the work… "in spite of all" - i.e. despite the despairing problems concerning the relationship between the artist and society. That, fortunately still allows you to create and confine a living-space, which is certainly not a conflict-free place for escapisms; it is a space where it's always possible to find the anchorage points of a positive attitude.
S.W. - In light of your research on my work, do you think there is a reaction to that "painting pornography" we talked about earlier?
E.C. - E.C. - I think so. More than a reaction, I'd say that I can sense a need to make room for a different equilibrium -certainly not a precarious, illusory or ordinary equilibrium but rather, perhaps, a more complicated balance than those which are today going through the crisis- between th