Shipwrecked with Spectator
Waves, sea, wind; Simon Weller's cosmos can be reduced to two elements. Weller's work suggests a disequilibrium manifested in cracks, fissures and holes, which presage a progressive crash (pulverization) about to reach its apex. The current phase of the artist, after the elaboration of her early 1980s experiments on Cubism, Automatism and pointillism, has finally reached the total dissolution of the sign in favor of concrete matter. Her last "Happy Shipwrecks" exhibit distant echoes of those early studies retraceable only on paper's margins and on canvases, torn and pulled up, gathered in the new compositions on fragile wooden architectures. Simona Weller moves away from painting and follows her instinct to carve lines and create waves - waves which are even evoked in her pseudonym (Weller in German is a form of citation derived from wellen, which means to undulate) and scattered in space as residues of her mental shipwrecks.
The first signs of the most recent developments appear already in the research that the artist elaborated in the mid 80s through her writing exercises. The written word in those works is never a mere sign, a graphic form. Incised on the border like a pointed knife, the line of every word from Weller's iconographic glossary - where terms such Sea (mare), dawn (alba), ocean (oceano) are recurrent - disappear in its very silhouette as if absorbed by shadow.
The work is about a study on the border-contour, which retains the polysemic nature of the word as sign and significance, sound and sense. Then, more distant echoes appear, echoes which do not originate directly from painting, but from literature. The un-violable white candor of Mallarmé, the emptiness and silence of T. S. Eliot, "the waves" of memory of Virginia Woolf (to which Mario Praz refers as to an example of literary pointillism). The literary overflow, witnessed by the continuous reference to the shipwreck tradition of Ungaretti and Dylan Thomas, allows a certain verticality and self-absorption in language and consciousness which appear in the unexpected, in possible and fascinating Freudian interpretations.
Sea (mare) in psychoanalysis magma is the reflective mirror for mother (madre) as a reality in its metaphoric version - the parallel is even more evident in the French terms mer, mère. Weller's artistic universe depicts the peculiarity of a dialogue between creation and generation, art and nature.
In the exhibition organized at the Granarone in Calcata this large cosmos in continuous transformation is visible in all its clarity. The shipwreck is abandonment, a defeat by nature and chaos. In common language, this might have moral connotations - "a Season in Hell" in which one is in search for the art's malignant spirit, the threshold between life and death. "Death by Water" writes Eliot. Otherwise it is regeneration. Yet regeneration not in the sense of reconstructing a perfectly harmonious Cosmos, but rather leaving a visible wound, namely the difference that art experience invokes.
Rome, November, 1995