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