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