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