In Search for the Lost Sign

When, only nineteen years old, Simona Weller enters the Italian art scene, the controversy between abstractionism and representation is raging. The young Neo-Dada of Piazza del Popolo have come out, while in the United States Pop Art is widely popular. When Simona visits the exhibitions, she gets confused by the vitality of Guttuso and, on the other hand, by the informal non-representation of matter. Among the women artists, Simona Weller loves Maselli, she is intrigued by Fioroni and she does not understand Carla Accardi. She does not identify with the artists the authoritative "Paese sera" writes about, but she is sure she will become a painter herself.

After a classical education she attends the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, to legitimate her path in front of her family and maybe in front of herself. She needs this path to take possession of all the techniques, from clay-moulding to etching, from fresco to the great Italian tradition of egg-painting. She needs this path to have a chance to draw live everyday and to then fly away, towards distant lands. The chance is a UNESCO scholarship for a country in the far East: Siam. Destiny or instinct, Simona looks for her own path by travelling, long before those young people who, in ten years' time, will have the myth of India. Like all the first, great travels, hers as well prove a sort of initiation. Being in touch with other worlds, religions and civilizations, the Italian culture's disputes, the art-system's intrigues now seem small and wretched.

During her adolescence she feeds herself with travel accounts, is charmed by Gauguin's exoticism and considers Galileo Chini an important artist whose lesson she will rediscover in the landscapes of Thailand. In this period, she dreams and lives like a young explorer from Rimbaud and Verlaine's time. She still has not focused the fact that she is a woman. And a pioneer.

The thing that strikes her most over there, are the details of that indecipherable writing. Cuneiform characters and ideograms whose secret harmony Simona senses (and records as something that could be used one day). Down there, everything looks wonderful: the sea, the rivers, the rice-fields, the jungle, the dead cities. People's clothes, the iridescent colour of the fabrics, the bronze glare on the women's skin, the violent smells. I linger over these years of Simona's youth because I think that, from this experience, she got the life-long originality of her research and a strong feeling of identity.

Coming back from each of her long travels (in Thailand, Egypt, Spain) Simona keeps on studying at the Academy, until she graduates. She studied with Ferrazzi, Mafai and Maccari who did their best to convey her disenchantment and scepticism for a life she dreams dedicated to the art.

Suddenly, she understands that being a woman is a discriminating factor (she must constantly pretend not to hear the list of clichés poured out by whoever she meets). When, seemingly, everybody tries to discourage her, she defies destiny once again: she gets married, has two children and self-exiles in the countryside of Umbria to paint, she says, far from worldly temptations.

Of course her solitude, her contact with the nature and her maternity deeply affect her work. Her painting frees itself from the academic and folk remains and begins to express her own independent world. Her technique improves and gets sharper. In this period ( 1965 - 1970 ) she uses enamels and inks on precious papers. Rice-papers (Chinese or Japanese) or canvas prepared like walls. On these surfaces appear insects, fossils, wild berries drawn with an entomologist's precision and with Klee's poetry.
Every time Simona leaves her retreat, she visits the great exhibitions and gets the attention of some critics. She has already started inserting in her paintings - though shyly - sentences, verses, writings inspired by the Latin inscriptions you see on Roman ruins. Her natural-surrealistic ( as the first critics called it ) world is still connected to the cycle of life, to the metamorphosis of the things that sprout just below - or immediately up - the earth.
Meanwhile, in the art world, anything goes. In 1962, the Biennial exhibition in Venice definitely launched the Pop Art and, together with this new trend, it launched an artist Simona will truly admire: Louise Nevelson. Then the trends will follow one another: Kinetic art, Op art… A committed Neo-representation goes on ( commitment expressed for example by inserting the silhouette of an American soldier in Vietnam watching landscapes and hyper-realistic still-lives ). The first sado-maso fantasies and happenings of the body-art begin.
- It took a lot of moral strength and self-confidence not to let the inclusion-exclusion game touch you. The important exhibitions were, even then, the monopoly of a few critics and it wasn't easy to enter the "system" staying true to yourself… Just think that we used to say, as a joke: Tom? Oh… he still paints with a brush!

In this state of mind, in the beginning of the seventies, Simona faces a personal revolution. She gets divorced, goes back to Rome and starts teaching painting techniques as an assistant to Giulio Turcato. In the same time she lives with the poet and critic Cesare Vivaldi. As the world surrounding her changes, her painting starts anew. These are the years she finds out again that a painting can be filled with signs and words, not only colour. In the beginning, it's just black surfaces she traces on signs imitating the graffiti on the walls or on the blackboards, powerfully expressing her unconscious but also her dreams as an unhappy child. Simona says that, among the paintings that moved her the most during her first visit to Paris (1971) there was one of Picabia - not exactly a painting - covered by the signings and the sentences of his friends.

From the blackboards, the painter moves to the copybook pages, where the children's sign alternates with the intervention of a hypothetical teacher. The first critics who wrote about this cycle were - of course - Vivaldi, then Enrico Crispolti and Murilo Mendes. In 1973 she's invited to the Tenth Quadriennial exhibition in Rome, in the non-representational section. She had already exhibited in Remo Pastori's gallery "Il punto" in Turin and in Calice Ligure, winning the attention of some important Turinese art collectors. She was nominated for the Bolaffi prize by Giuliano Briganti, who was apparently hit by her showroom at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome.

Now her black works, a sort of trompe-l'oeil of blackboards, alternate with big, coloured canvas where a word traced countless times, stratify forming a weaving, a texture. The frequent trips to Paris and the impact with the Impressionists hit her deeply. To trace the key-word ( grass, sea, dawn, corn etc.) the artist uses an oil pastel. The colours follow the technique of pointillism so the texture is never flat and, watched from a distance, it conveys an extraordinary effect of depth. Simona Weller has therefore reached what she was looking for: to define a mental landscape through an apparently non-semantic word that, filling the surface of the canvas, becomes itself a painting. After such achievement, any of her colleagues would have stopped. But the pressure of the market (these years she starts her business with the art dealers) leads her to a renewal, to grow and achieve new goals.

Though belonging to no group, Weller could be historicized in the area of a lyrical abstractionism or better of a written painting (therefore of a non-representation of sign); on the contrary, she's been by force inserted in the current of visual poetry. Not accidentally in fact, she will participate to several exhibitions organized by Mirella Bentivoglio for this trend. This mistake will be repeated by Nello Ponente who, in the great exhibition "Lines of the artistic research in the last twenty years" in 1980 at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, will place Weller in the visual poetry section. For these exhibitions Simona uses rigorously black or white works, avoiding all decorations, disliked by the visual poets. But this forced insertion shall not put the artist at ease, because she does not accept the definition and cannot give up her colour painting. A painting that, in time, changes through rubbings and drippings. Until, after a conceptual study on Seurat's work she extracts, undo and recreates details from "La Grande Jatte" and starts working on the tache. Colour stains that rub or give a rhythm to the writing below. In fact, while in the beginning of the seventies her writing stratifies on itself, now ( 1978 ) it becomes a structure that gives a solidity to her work.

In 1978, Lorenza Trucchi invites Weller to Palazzo delle Esposizioni for the "Art-Research" exhibition. This allows her to make the proceeding clear, setting in a room both the details from Seurat, painted on long horizontal stripes and two big works dedicated to the sea: the first is solar and diurnal, the second lunar and nocturnal. The showroom is called: "Paraphrasing Seurat, a Sunday afternoon on the… Tiberine island".

The message is ironic , but also provocative for some critics who promote a representation "at all costs" and will comment: "We understand but don't share it".

This act of faith in a painting more and more diminished by the trends will be awarded that year with an invitation to the Biennial in Venice, in the "From page to space" exhibition, held at Magazzini del Sale. In this occasion Simona Weller will create square modules ( cm 50x50 ) as a wall - journal that follows all the steps of her written painting.

With that invitation Weller ends a cycle of her research.

One day, in her studio in via Margutta, 48 ( where three quarters of post war Italian art passed ) she's gluing fragments of old tempera of hers. She cuts the stripes of painting she thinks are good and glues them on some background she painted: grass or sea, as usual. The relief and up-to-light effect is so interesting that it will become the basis for her coming research. She actually affirms that her painting has always been growing on itself. In the first part of the eighties her research takes a new interesting turn, after her participation to an exhibition organized by Flavio Caroli and Luciano Caramel at Rotonda della Besana in Milan - "Textual: words and images" (the first and the last) about the phenomenon of painting-writing through the centuries. The eighties closed with her retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Macerata, where director Elverio Maurizi invites her and writes for her a good essay.

The first twenty years of her artistic history have seen Simona busy on all fronts. She published a fundamental essay on the Italian female artists in the 20th century, entered feminist circles and participated to international shows of female artists. In the spring of 1976 she lived a few months in New York, where she met important artists (though far from her own trend) like Marcia Hafif, Robert Morris, Simone Forti. She also met the great art manager Leo Castelli who suggested her to settle in Soho, to look for a loft and to become a part of New York school. For this brilliant future Simona should leave Italy, her two children and her beloved partner, her job as a teacher, extraordinary friends and the culture she belongs to. A humanistic, European, maybe decadent culture, but her own. The brief American experience confirms the quality of her research and makes her identity stronger. You can't confuse the art market with art, she says. In this decade Simona meets and makes friends with some of the "great old ones" of Italian art: from Giuseppe Capogrossi to Giorgio de Chirico, from Nino Corpora to Giulio Turcato, from Toti Scialoja to Alberto Burri, from Afro Basaldella to Mauro Reggiani. To write the essay "Michelangelo's complex" she also meets Edita Broglio and Antonietta Raphäel, Carla Accardi, Titina Maselli, Adriana Pincherle, the Levi Montalcini sisters and many more. Through the tales and memories of all those artists, her "romantic" belief grows stronger.

Moreover, every year from 1970 to 1980, from June to September she works in Liguria, in the triangle Finale Ligure-Calice-Albisola, where she meets Andy Warhol, who's writing his autobiography while hosted by the Swiss art manager Janneret. In those restless Ligurian summers, Simona starts working on ceramics, also participating in an international exhibition at Villa Faraggiana in Albisola. She will complete this research working for short periods and up till now in the factories of Deruta.
In time, the excessive flow of the writing that fills the space of the canvas like an obsessive horror vacui, becomes a web the creativity of the artist feels trapped in.

After the study on Seurat she passes to the space in Cubism. From Braque, Picasso, Severini, she isolates details she mixes up with fragments of her own life and parts of her old works. This is the origin of a series of big panels on set-designing material that express the suggestion of a historical avant-garde she absorbed and reinvented, surely in a more mature and personal way than the clumsy cubist influence affecting the artists during the fifties. Also her titles were inspired by Gertrud Stein's writings ("Ode to the eyelashes of a Lady") while the critical text was written by Palma Bucarelli and translated in Dutch and German for a travelling exhibition from Rome to Ferrara and from Amsterdam to Berlin, whose title will be another quotation from Stein: "A sign is the specimen spoken". This is therefore an educated, deftly executed painting. Anyway, in this cycle, too, black works appear, reminding us of the old blackboards. I think Simona stops writing in the paintings at a new turn of her private life. In this period the artist writes books, articles, essays. The writing is back on the page, so the painting can receive something else.

The invitation to 1986 the Quadriennial exhibition allows Weller to go a step further. Her sign, or its fragment, turns into a wave-like macro-module. Actually, these signs are but fragments of words. The superficial observer, ignoring those passages, reads in those signs a link with Balla's "flag-wavings". I have always rejected this association because I think that, in Weller's paintings, the linearity of the writing stays alive, from left to right. From now on, Simona's painting goes through a highly experimental phase, during which she uses different materials, reaching its peak in the nineties. Here are relief paintings, visible frames, cuttings. As if the canvas and what's represented on it had to bear the fury of the elements, fire, water and wind. The "Happy shipwrecks" cycle is born, inspired by those popular verses by Ungaretti: "And he immediately goes back to his traveling, after the shipwreck, the old sea dog…".

A more than symbolic sentence that reflects the attitude of the artist towards her life and her art.

Following Weller's history year by year, analysing her tight relationship with the art and documenting on her rich bibliography, I realized I had a great responsibility and a privilege. I had the chance to draw some conclusions about an artist who, through the years, found an independent and recognizable identity of her own, in spite of all cultural terrorism.

What Marisa Volpi wrote in 1976 is still worthy (Galleria San Fedele-Milano): "… The subtle game is between the title announcing its semantic in a literary way and the painting, physically implying the nature… A nature and a landscape revealing their symbolic essence as something else, universe, unknown, unconscious, endlessly changing, from beauty to desolation…" but, above all, I agree with Volpi writing: "It's indicative that this aspect of Abstractionism, derived by Impressionism, has been concealed by the puritan intentions of historical avant-gardes, like Constructivism, like Bauhaus and its derivations, who wanted to state the problem of a modern style and tried all means to eliminate the individual relationship with self and world perception".

And individual perception is the fulcrum that best characterizes Weller's long research, whose language, staying in touch with formal colour tradition (from Seurat to Balla to Dorazio) lately manages to astonish us, with unpredictable expressive solutions. Solutions not only connected to paint or canvas, but also to recycled materials (carton and used wood). The work executed on clay moulding by the artist, whose sign becomes matter, deserves a speech apart… But this is another introduction.

In this exhibition at Giraldi Gallery (not accidentally, Bruno Giraldi has been one of Simona Weller's first admirers), forty years of intense and rich work are represented and, though being widely historicized, they can get a further and definitive recognition. Because, as a journalist wrote for her retrospective exhibition "The colour of time" (Narni, 1989), Simona Weller is surely the most important and representative artist of her generation.

Roma, June 2001