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