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