Letters from an Italian Painter to Vincent Van Gogh
"We are such a small thing and, to become a ring in the chain of the artists, we have to pay a high price in terms of youth, health, freedom", states Van Gogh in a letter dating 10th May 1890. To this symbolic ring is bound a suggestive side of the artistic work of Simona Weller who, for long and more than once, has kept a tight dialogue with the writings of this great Dutchman.
A relationship with a history of its own. During the seventies, her painting-writing was very close to the bristling and the fury of her imaginary interlocutor, joined through the quotation of isolated words, cried on the surface of the canvas and associated to a sign at times violent, accepted, denied, deleted that crushed the rhythm of the path. Nowadays, her painted page is the tale of a quieter meditation, crossed by an involuntary harmony, even though full of a repressed restlessness, connected to the reduced fever we can find in some of Van Gogh's writings, where communication gets more intensely internal.
The painter tenaciously pursues a self-excavation, stimulated by the enlightenment offered by some emblematic sparks, received without a clear order, in a ceaseless flow. She works slowly, tracing a sign full of chromatic vibrations, repeating the action in a dowsing research for a communication with the rhythms of that extraordinary, bare sensitivity. She adheres to the aspects that better represent the truth of a state of mind, reflecting them with the characteristics of a dream and the will of her fantasy.
Just like the word in Van Gogh, her sign shows longings, desires, fury, tearing - all projected in a space where the unconscious turns to be far more poetical than conscious life. That's not the sign of a psychic escape but the will to record this spontaneous, ceaseless flow on the way of an initiation.
The dynamics of the action reflect that feeling of intense motion animating the Van Goghian universe; the iterative, sometimes circular structure of the sign seems to recall the constant repetition, in the letters of the Dutchman, of terms like "unite", "to link", "to tie", "to bring near", "to embrace". A repetitiveness in which the elements integrate, get mixed up and overlap endlessly. A microcosm is born that eludes all decorative attitude and concentrates, through a few elements, the vital motion in a controllable space. The signs then alternate with small episodes that induce the imagination to narrate a tale.
As the weaving gets complicated, the artist turns back to the burning side of Van Gogh's personality, recalling the vortex that sweeps the canvas with the movement of a brush; back to the breaking lines, so similar to a furious yet tender wave, that implies a mystical structure. A way to detect the non-duration, the abolition of time, the life in an eternal present.
In the latest paintings, blue dominates; the colour of dreams that, as some semiologists state, is the first to be perceived by the child soon after birth. This confirms an attitude, admitted by the artist herself, that evokes children's writing and somehow reflects its sublime innocence.
Rome, May 2003