The Restless Painting of Simona Weller
"If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; A wave to pant beneath thy power…"
Ode to the West Wind P.B. Shelley
The unique fusion of aesthetic and metaphorical values characterizing Simona Weller's work reveals itself throughout her entire remarkable production, stratified though long years of researching.
There is always an impulse (a push, a wave, as her name suggests: Weller means wave-maker) beyond the composition and the constructive order of her pictures. These gradually form and define themselves when that existential emotion is appeased by the use of colours and materials inside and outside the canvas, through and around the frame. Every piece of work is therefore a fragment of this existence, a metaphor of life, meant as correspondence between nature and art.
The tendency towards a type of painting expresses itself as an emotional movement, as a continuous impulse coming from one's deepest being; this can be seen since the artist's very first works, which date back to the mid-sixties and which are inspired by a strongly metamorphic surrealism which recalls the Max Ernst of the Forties. A surrealism encouraged by the continuous and fluctuating sign, that we find in other surrealists of the same period -such as Bellmer of Tanguy- and a also a very automatic one, according to Masson's and Miro's lessons. This graphic sign, powerful, coloured, luminous, will soon transform into the painting-writing of the Seventies; a dense wave-like writing that already contains the large canvases of the future. A sign-writing that will characterize her mature and very personal style, until the most recent works. The sign-writing, the word as colour, tache, the filled canvas, constitute the artist's method to formulate a poetic diary through images that sum up the daily experience. A memory, a game with a cultural filter (never too heavy) provided by the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde movements: from Mondrian to Klee to Cy Twombly (see I due fratelli nell'estate del 1969).
In the subsequent works, the writing is overwhelmed by colour: strong post-impressionist influences (especially Seurat) will induce Simona Weller to fill the canvas with layers and bands of colour of different luminosities, so that the architecture of the pictures is defined by different degrees of light, still maintaining the written pattern, continuous from left to right (see Vibrazione viola sulla parola mare or Vibrazione rosa sulla parola alba, where the leit-motiv, the word, is so absorbed by the colour-sign that it is almost unrecognizable at first glance, and the feeling of this evocation-repetition comes true in the totality of the pictorial and metaphorical field). It is "a subtle game" as Marisa Volpi Orlandini has acutely observed " between the title, revealing her semantics in a literary sense, and a type of painting physically alluding to nature, at which the artist seems to hurl herself with all her passion".
A vital jump, I would say, in a Bergsonian sense of the word, a force of a first solar impression, that the artist draws from the instinctive relationship between the idea of the sea and a concrete pictorial formalism.
That's why the word gradually disappears and the graphic sign that it had contained survives only as movement (wave). The colour, which is allusive, psychological, repetitive, existential, becomes a being into painting, as in Capogrossi, Accardi, Sanfilippo, Dorazio (see Controluce di parole).
But The continuum of Simona Weller feeds itself with further composing elements inferred with the great vivacity of the cubist and metaphysical themes which surface in her canvases. One could say, brought about by the wave of abstract formal colour associations restored by time and personal memories. In her inexhaustible research, the influence of futuristic dynamism - and in particular that of the abstract Balla - never seems absent.
The flying flashing forms of a painting of the great futurist master, Insidie di guerra (1915) become the creative modules of her most recent works, many of which are enriched by the use of thicker materials (overlapping of cardboard, cloth, glue, skilfully treated paper that is dried in the open air, in the summer heat of the countryside).
Simona Weller is so immersed in painting, and in the idea of renewing painting, that it's not possible to find a formula for her, a definition that will contain her overflowing and disturbed (but not disturbing) activity. Very recent works such as Mare-Amaro, Il segno barocco del fuoco (1990) testify, with their formal and emotional impact, a type of art that keeps expanding the traditional borders of perception, while reflecting the movements of the artist's soul.
Rome, October 1991