The Sign-Symbol of Simona Weller

After the important inventions introduced by the historical avant-gardes, one must return to the humility of rediscovery, reducing the emphasis and communication between the minimal excesses of the current pictorial and situational grammar, to think about the linguistic elements involved and their use as construction elements. A woman artist, in particular, feels compelled to create different relationships with society, a way of giving order to gesture and to materials, and to the space to be filled.

Analysing the art system means to accept colour as an osmotic membrane underlining the autonomy and reality of the "whole" which, at the same time, is composed of the object and its surface, matter and chromatics, which occupy and integrate space, underlining the organisational rules of basic elements; it also means to underline the most simple linguistic elements, in order to analyse the creation as related to the work's system, which again should be perceived in its twofold nature relating to nature and culture. On the other hand, we -like Cassirer- are more and more aware that we are surrounded by a process of ever growing symbolisation. Our world is a universe made of signs and symbols in which every shape, word or gesture can be exemplified, allowing us to believe, above and below their pathways, that they are references to a behavioural pattern going beyond the work of art itself. The symbol's function is to clarify the need to understand things; it indicates a place, an event or even a pathway, a physical space and track, used during our daily encounters, before which we can observe the appearance of a phenomenon of apparent indifference or of emotional-repulsive motions.

These are the real reasons why we believe Simona Weller is searching to uncover, with the greatest concentration and the slightest effort, the fragments of the unexpected stratifications of images deposited in her own deepest being; a search whose pulsations and emotions are conjugated with feminine suffixes, almost as if this were to become the beginning of an affirmative discussion and a severely highlighted dialogue in which reality is acknowledged and rediscovery shown as if it were emerging from a forgotten, unresolved situation in the middle of unequal floating, volatile and contradictory signs. There is certainly an entry or a return - we don't know which - to a consistency of colour, memories, and dreams caught while they develop, all through the use of a series of symbols, of a happy and fecund naturalness that needs no interpretation or explanation but must just be there, to deny, again, an intimate and personal history of silences, denial, censorship, of absurd and alienating removal processes.

In Weller's most recent works there appears to be a clear, pressing need to clarify the elements seen in her previous works, in order to continue to live and meditate about the perception of a closed situation, so that the symbols moving across the canvasses with small scores, underscoring, weft and weaving, continuous and discontinuous, allow us to perceive a protracted explosion from the preceding nucleus of her writing, which disseminates itself and proceeds horizontally towards the abyss of an alchemic transmutation, wherein the viewer sees him/herself as an abbreviated vibrating, pictorial and graphical signal. Here is a creation somewhere between the diary-like impulse to write (using the physiology of the symbol itself) and a sign filled with chromatic vibrations but which, at the same time, is never abstract or automatic; an encounter marked by various levels of experience and analogies.

This decisive crossroad is found at this point of her work, on paper and on velvet. In fact, the sign used to control space narrates, as always, a pathway, and this sign appears to be a measurable element, instant, elementary, obsessive yet free, an emotional, innocent adventure as if born in infancy, yet bearing intellectual depth and vision. It is therefore essential to find a system in which emptiness and fullness can be arranged. The sign/symbol adopts a mechanism using continuous repetition, not as a finished gesture but as a variable tensor, moving and following emotional and rational behaviour patterns. In this way, the perceptive means is clear and one comprehends an operation where arrows are shot at absolute and symbolic values, above all tones, light, and colours, above and below, move in an optical play towards an intense and dynamic conquest of space where one sees the gradual alignment of a series of pins imitating the unending routines of daily life. The repeated use of this mentally controlled dripping is undertaken with no attention to the borders of the surface, and the dripping moves towards them, as if searching for a relationship between the work and what takes place in the area beyond it. The paper or velvet receive the simplest of signals; a dotted line from which minimal pulsations are underlined, together with imperceptible levels of sensitivity, thereby producing an operation in which sign and concept coincide and become the framework of a long descent into the unconscious, moving into remote memories in which hesitation and knowledge mix in a simultaneous movement of bergsonian length, continuing in the present and going towards the future.

The sign invades the surrounding space, confirming its continuation through time, not just as a straight line moving towards a central arrival point, but with a series of movements indicating repetitions, sliding, interruptions, always in a two dimensional state, soft yet thick. Everything is channelled towards an ever-changing transformation, richer, more complicated, dilated beyond any pre-planned structure and, therefore, far from the boring label usually given to optical art. The points proceeding in a never-ending series, are not part of a traced line representing pre-planned or pragmatically imposed gestures, but they appear to be the record of something living, moving or open to an afterwards. The keys for breaking the code of these messages are not given because we are dealing with symbols/signs, a series of symptoms that refer to something that is happening or that is being consumed in the motion of relativity -which is the only absolute we have left- as a possibility to be "here" and "now".

The instinctive automation of the gesture - where gesture is a means with intrinsic qualities of an organic nature, tied to subconscious- belongs to a humanistic culture whose roots developed way beneath the Italian tradition, that moves from tones to timbres and expresses itself in the gargoyles of a language given back in a signal-visual form, capable of receiving inspiration and breath from the sea, water, sunshine and from the clear air of a country morning.

Nature, celebrated in this way, is dissected into little pieces down to its simplest elements, in order to recreate syntax that lies at the origin of all semantic painting, interspersed with rhythms echoed in those often seen on the walls of the Ravenna basilicas. The colour impulses are always closely linked to writing, to the signs produced, while the use of white strengthens, like light, the neuralgic centres of the vibrating fabric. Luminosity arrives mysteriously on the opaque black of the background. The minute figures that appear, measured carefully by a hand that draws and an eye that guides, are no longer within space but become space and represent the last frontier of the Illusionism of Modern painting.

The point or dot therefore becomes chromatic quantity, capable of suggesting continuity, creating the fullness and the emptiness of a conscience; a consciousness that is not the opposite of unconscious, but which is capable of living with the conscious and unconscious at the same time, reality received in a visual blow up.

The most recent paintings by Weller are able to create themselves within the chromatics used, in a process that is in time capable of expressing the contradictions of painting, its meaningful actions, its history, which today, more than ever before, places us in front of the pulsations rising from a profound structure.

The artist, although never overcome by her private phantoms, has used a certain nocturnal element within her imagination, permitting a vision of her ongoing race towards the apex of her symbols - for example the Sea and the Wave, a liquid element, giver of life, therefore feminine-: both are typical of the European habitat, wherein they are traditional linguistic elements narrating themselves ambiguously, guided by a metaphor, to which we owe much, not only for the persistence of memories, but for its still unbroken and liberating aim.

Rome, January 1978