Simona Weller: a Path Toward the Unconscious

We shouldn't get carried away by memories, by the amazement of the past. It might ruin the objectiveness of the story. When an image triggers the trap of memory, it immediately releases some sort of sympathy and personal participation. Nevertheless, as far as I am concerned, in Simona Weller's paintings I cannot do otherwise, and this goes beyond any critical issue and any thought on language, beyond any consideration on her work's position within our modern times, which are so uncertain, so dramatically tense and contradictory. I find myself fully involved, confused by different feelings. At first I was reluctant to confess it, but then, thinking about it, I realized that it was unfair to not tell, because what I was hiding would have immediately come out to the eyes of a careful reader. And that's not all.
We should, once for all, wonder whether or not it's appropriate to face things naturally and sincerely. Someone may though object that what Simona Weller's painting suggests to me is just the result of my private experience, of issues that belong to me only. Well, Sir, that may be true but only up to a certain point! And here, just for you, I have a thought that dates back to many years ago, but which is still very true. In an unfinished posthumous essay named "Philosophical Art", Baudelaire states that "every good sculpture, every good painting, every good music suggests the feelings and the thoughts it is meant to suggest".

Well, Simona Weller's work is soaked with a sea air, with the echoes of far away voices, not yet covered by the noises of a highway, but just scattered out like sudden kids' yells, disturbed by some call - a name shouted from a window- which then fades while refracting its own echo; then the backwash dominates again, re-launching, almost in flights, the salty taste, the smell of the nets, of the seashells and of the cuttlebones in the sun.

It is a return to an ever-present childhood- and we will later explain the concept-; a return to "now", today just like yesterday. And with this return, many more vibrations, suggestions, silences between the palm trees and the pine trees overlooking the sea, in the pathways of lime homes, between the deserted gardens of (apparently) isolated villas, and the waiting of youth, of a season in which everything - images, sounds, smells and encounters- tastes like a dreamt reality which must come true, which is the desire of something that is developing and growing within us.

And then the light which dazzles, splitting the palm trees' fans, falling on the stork's bills and stealing their perfume, on the agaves and on the rose-bay, maybe in a small slumbering train station… and it is not just a physical fact. It is much more than that, and very different. Nature thus becomes feeling and sense, sensation and happening; it becomes a character, just like each one of us is or was and, at the same time, it becomes a fair copy notebook on which we are about to write, watching that we do not fold the margins of the page and that we do not stain or smudge the last word.

It is childhood or youth, coming back with their fragrance, their naivety , their dreams and their dramas, though often very small. The hand runs slowly on the paper and word take up their own shape: sea (written with the rhythm of the waves); waves (the same way) and then grass, sky and much more.

A childhood that was lost just like paradise, a childhood that we take with us and that we look for. And it's not a game or an artifice. We must be clear, ready to catch the glimpses of memory of a second that isn't now, but which now emerges, recalled, evoked; looking within ourselves, transferring (with a simultaneity that is sense and feeling) today's reality in yesterday's reality by using some autobiography, just as much as necessary to write pages addressed to others as well.

Therefore, the enchantment of colour, page after page, seems to widen up, to catch us and contaminate us, it seems to make us part of a happening and of another and another, wrapping us up in a slight "spleen". A page therefore immediately changes to another by overlapping; the light filters through the colours in a slanted fashion and colour becomes light -though, actually, it was light already-; sign and word transform to reference points, to obstacles that are only apparent, and we immediately realize that they are catch and pause areas from which the eye can move to continue its path, to see what has already been seen and to recreate it once more.
Writing, sign and their value; a very unique value. Writing and sign, handwriting and short background made of brush strokes, which, one next to the other, are mystery and revelation in the expression of a world born of childhood and youth; they are colour, rhythm, cadenza, pause, overlapping, sequence, tone, voice and attenuation.

But all of this would be incomplete, or rather, it would be partial, if, in Simona Weller's work, we didn't consider- together with this courage of being in nature and in reality, translated not only into a pure call of atmospheres and colours- the contemporary implication and that kind of considerations on those instruments that culture has provided us with and that Simona managed to capture in her personal exploration. For the past, we have recalled the colours of the late Van Gogh and some Divisionist cadences (the recurring names are those of Seurat and Monet) and then we focused on the value of writing and sign, until we mentioned Twombly. Plus, when Weller composed her paintings with a series of dowels from which colour dripped, somebody mentioned the name of Mondrian, the dunes, nature's transition phase, the transition phase of reality towards its mystical invention of absolute and concrete equilibrium. And this is right, if we consider it with the due caution and without declutching.

I in fact do not believe that Simona Weller's reality can be restricted, without further explanation, within predefined limits; it cannot be, as we say today, "coded". Hers is mainly a human attitude, the attitude of a person that looks around consciously and with a critical eye, of a person who also considers what the past has brought to her, but especially of a person able to look inside herself. Her journey is therefore sentimental, but only up to a certain point. It is the result of a survey that allows something completely different to emerge. Her thoughts on the language of painting, on language and on painting and on painting as a language is, in other words, the element used to express herself and to existentially define her own reality and to come out of it at the same time.

It is therefore an introspection and a path within her unconscious, operated with aware attention, but also with slight participation. And that's not all.
If there is a handwritten sign that becomes something else while suggesting a word, which is in itself already image and vice versa, if there is a colour that once for its shades and another time for its tones lets us into a dimension that, though staying as it is, still bears the condition for becoming something else, if all this exists, then we have to highlight a simultaneity both on an aesthetic level as well as on a psychological level. It is a simultaneity that corresponds to a mirror, to the refraction of images and situations, it is a simultaneity that corresponds to a kaleidoscope that projects us into an iridescent game of pages that are quiet at one point and melancholically dreamy at some other point, dark at one point and ironic at another.
Pages that are though always revealing, mysterious and present.

Rome, January 1977