An Interpretation of Simona Weller's Painting-Writing

As an art historian of the Renaissance I was at first intimidated by Simona Weller's complex and important contribution to contemporary art. Then, once the dialogue between spectator and work of art was established, the latter appeared as a visual manifestation elaborated with original technique and dense with meaning. The aim of this essay is to analyze the meaning and technique of a particular phase of Weller's career, namely her visual study on the possible functions of the word within the image. In certain canvases of the painter the word becomes a sort of ductus repeated as a module. A module which is not a mere geometric figure but, and this is Weller's invention, a word chosen for its evocative content. The painter's favorite terms, sea, grass, wheat, sky, dawn (mare, erba, grano, cielo, alba) are used as serial repetitions painted with bright pastel colors on monumental canvases.

The history of Western art is imbued with a verbal component perfected in different media and means. From the ancient Horatian simile of ut pictura poesis, images and words confront each other according to the complex theories of these two arts: poetry has inspired painting and vice versa in a fluid exchange of ideas and suggestions. The two arts have often followed analogous models, but at times the association has been analogical: from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs to medieval illuminated manuscripts, from painted voices of Beato Angelico to the mysterious sense of Et in Arcadia ego by Poussin. Moreover, one must not forget the phonetic experiments of futurism and contemporary computer-generated writing in which letters, words, phrases and texts support images or become images themselves.
Simona Weller studied classical art and began her career as an academic painter before experimenting with various tendencies of modern art: from impressionism to divisionism, from cubism to surrealism and dadaism. Her painting-writing might be associated with the expressive styles of Novelli, Boetti, Twombly and Basquiat (though this last elaborated his graffiti and blackboards about fifteen years later), but Weller comes to this language with her own profoundly different artistic identity. If the so called "blackboards" of Simona Weller share certain elements with Basquiat and Twombly, her serial words differ from the trends of this artistic dialogue between Rome and New York to establish her as an artist with her own particular style. Undoubtedly, Weller is neither the first nor the last artist to have employed painted words on canvas, but she is the only one to have used an original artistic process which, employing a simple word-module, is capable of evoking emotionally the feeling of a dawn, a sunset over the sea or a field of wheat.

In Weller's work a word is decodified in its manifestation as writing, in its repetition and superimposition to weave colours employed according to the parameters of divisionism. Let us take the term "sea" (mare): in Weller's work it is not merely indicative of a vast extension of water but also of a surface that contains within itself constant movement of waves or even storms. The word grass (erba) and wheat (grano), whose blades or ears moved by the wind, follow the same principles of movement and extension. For the artist, infinity is not merely implied in the immensity of the ocean or in the unending expanse of meadows or fields of wheat but in the universal immensity of nature itself.

Thus, the infinite is seen to be a constant principle in these works at both a spatial and creative level in time. Water has always been the most evident symbol of the natura naturans, the symbol par excellence of the renewal of nature through rain generated by clouds born of the sea. It is not surprising, therefore, that by repeating the word sea (mare) on the canvas, the artist does not fix a single idea, iconically frozen on the surface, but leaves a suggestion of constant fluctuation in time and space. Similarly, grass (erba) and wheat (grano) represent not only the symbols of fertility, but also the passage of the seasons through the eternal cycle of life and death. Hence, in the canvases Erba and Grano, colours and pigments are subject to a temporal and physical metamorphosis in the process of writing in order, at times, to become what they had been in the beginning. No wonder that the supporting perimeter cannot contain either the painted concept or the extension of the pictorial expression. The painting suggests the expansion of writing beyond the confines of the canvas.
Although horizontally organized, Weller's writing is neither linear nor repetitive in graphic form or its colours. The word or, better, the act of writing becomes a blue wave, a green blade or golden ear of wheat that changes tonality according to the light of the sun whether at its zenith, at sunset or at dawn. In Talatta talatta (1976-78) the surface is transformed into reflecting foam, shining as if wet. In the works "grass" and "wheat" (erba and grano) (1971-74, reinterpreted in this century) the colours and pigments become fiber as if transformed into vegetal textile. Thus Weller's word is a synecdoche, a sign that refers us back to the total perception of her creation a part, as indicated by the rhetorical trope, signifying the whole. Rhetorical references can also be found in the structure of the work itself where a sign is repeated as an anaphora. Writing, understood as a continuum, becomes a kind of prayer, or a litany to the point of becoming an alarming presage, a dramatic cry. The artist has realised the idea of figure and discourse interwoven in word and image.

How can writing become a form of visual art? Weller's writing is analogous to drawing. Through the act of marking the surface she explores, without fixing, the stream of thought with her hand. As if evoking Leonardo's act of artistic creation through the componimento inculto, Weller's representation of nature comes into being through elements in movement. Like the Renaissance master, Weller's hand explores not once, but many times thanks to her technique of superimposition. The artist superimposes word upon word to the point of evoking the idea of the componimento inculto, the composition that, by remaining an ingeniously open form, leads the spectator to participate with his emotions in the subjugated chaos of the work. In Weller's paintings a form is born from another, a word is truncated by the following one which, in turn, generates a further line of writing. Then, suddenly one or more terms are cancelled and rewritten elsewhere. Superimposition is a process which denies perspective but not spatial depth. Every word reveals something of the one underneath, which comes to the surface in spatial and semantic terms.

While Leonardo's composition leaves his ideas and forms in a state of chaotic representation, Weller imposes upon herself a geometric model that, while it denies the figurative, reorders chaos according to precise structures. Lines, grids, bands of colours evoke not only Cézanne's pre-cubist experiments but above all the page of a note-book and reasserts that the artist is writing with painting and painting with writing. Weller's structural lines establish a sequence and do not allow the work to overwhelm the artist completely. Indeed, the painter controls the work through precise operations. These organisational parameters, however, do not cease to evocate chaos: the chaos of life, the chaos of nature, the chaos that like the tireless hand of the artist continues to generate further creative forces. Through this fascinating interplay between order and chaos the work, like the dancing star praised by Nietzsche, takes its shape.

When at the end of the 1970s Simona Weller dedicated works to the word sea (mare), painted writing was no longer a childish or casual accumulation of words, but a carefully thought out study. Weller's painting-writing is constituted by dynamic lines of a phenomenological character. The artist establishes a correspondence between the movement of the sea, wind and grass and the movement of the hand. In the end a deliberate relationship between the subject and its execution is created. The artist represents the subject in a way that the eyes of the mind and the hand work reciprocally. Charged with violent colors, these active lines are like musical scores and as such they can be concise, strong or subtle. In this sense Mare mare, Talatta talatta and its variations have a capacity to bewitch in sound and light like a surface fluctuating, moving and reflecting the sun's rays at the different hours of the day.

At times the serial repetition is obsessive and the superimposition drives the emotional tension to the point in which painted words are transformed into a woven surface. If a close view reveals the microcosm of the individual word made out of a divisionist sign, a far view suggests the macrocosm of a text made of superimpositions. Mare mare and Talatta talatta are intertwined paintings in which words almost disappear and become illegible. From far away the painting is emotionally grasped rather than read intellectually. Consequently, its meaning is conveyed by means of color, movement and texture. In this second approach it is no longer the referentiality of a single semiotic sign but the apparent general semiotic effect that fills Weller's painting. By creating a web of words Weller creates a work interwoven with signs of colour which cover, without canceling, the warp of the canvas beneath.

The artist is a sort of Penelope who weaves a semiotic cloth and a plot of a poem. Even more Weller is an Ovidian heroine, a sort of a Philomela who weaves words to communicate her despair. Philomela, raped, deprived of her tongue and imprisoned in a tower, communicates with her sister Procne through words of fire secretly woven on a piece of fabric. However, Philomela's woven voice implies a spectator who, like her sister, understands the coded language employed by the maker and can free the silent prisoner. Philomela's communication is part of the Metamorphoses, a poem, but the woven voice is not a poem or rather is not only a poem. Philomela's fabric with its flame-marked signs can be considered a surface that communicates by means of semiotic systems shared with painting. Like Philomela's mute voice, Wellerpainted writing, even if it differs in its message, evokes poetry, but it is above all a visual work of art.

Simona Weller transforms the metaphorical communication invented by Ovid into a contemporary message through signs elaborated by modern art. The major influences on her seem to derive from impressionism. However, for Weller nature is neither Van Gogh's Provencal field nor the water around the Grand Jatte of Seurat. Weller's nature is a universal ideal which exists in the imagination of the artist. Although Talatta talatta was inspired by a sunset on the beach of Sabaudia, it does not have any recognizable element identifiable with the Tyrrhenian Sea. No banlieu on the horizon, no peasant at work or bourgeois on vacation, no narrative appears on the horizon: there is only the immense vastness of nature. On a more technical level, moreover, the Weller's written word somehow challenges the divisionist brushstroke. Van Gogh's brushstroke represents wheat or grass as a vertical filament. On the other hand, writing, though disconnected, implies a certain horizontality proper to the rhetoric Weller aims at imposing. In this structuralisation the artist seems to refer to the early works by Mondrian who employed divisionist taches and a grid structure.

Although Weller evokes divisionism in the way she elaborates a sign, Mondrian in her structure and rejects futurism in her meaning, some of her graphic experiments could make us think of certain inventions of Marinetti's poetry. Undoubtedly, the painter does not look to Marinetti as a source of meaning, but to his having freed words from the constraints of conventional syntax. In Weller's painting we do not find the mythology of war, praise of destruction or, much less yet, a spirit of rebellion. Rather, tonality and the movement of her painting have an almost contemplative, at times even a romantic, character. Weller evokes Marinetti's semantics and transforms it into a fundamentally different pictorial communication. In Weller's painting the fevered insomnia, leaps, blows and battles of futurist literature become wave, foam, wind, light and, in the most dynamic passages, fire and tempest. Marinetti's urban and technological velocity is transformed into the movement of nature, a nature, of course, which is not controlled by man but rather, even if sometimes at risk, dominates and enchants the beholder through contemplation. Weller perfects the so called inebriating word freed from punctuation, syntax, laws and norms. They are onomatopoeic words, at times olfactory, at times auditory, that in any case always remain visual. The artist writes or paints with words of different colors and typographic structures on blackboards but in the works under analysis here she favours the horizontality of handwriting. According to Marinetti free words do not aim at humanising nature (animal, vegetable, mineral), but on the contrary naturalise style by seeking to make it live from the very essence of the material. In Weller's representation of the sea, style is made liquid and becomes water with all its particles moving under the rays of light, losing its verbal structure to assume the substance evoked.
More so than futurism Weller's words elaborate a research between words and objects or, better yet, between les mots e les choses to evoke the long and complex French debate from Mallarmé to Foucault. By assuming a different appearance, the form of a word (especially following the near-far effect) becomes the object whose representation is intended.

Weller's art suggests a reflection on the link between words and that which they designate by studying all the riches hidden by the material invoked by the word itself. For this reason the interweaving of words, even if structured according to the parameters of geometry, has a natural and organic power. Just like the poetry of Francis Ponge, Weller's work is united to the object under examination so that the sea of Mare Mare becomes liquid, is filled with the colours and emotions that this process implies. The observer finds himself in front of a synthesis of the word between proper noun, common noun, concrete noun and modified noun, and all of their corollary adjectives, and, finally, the abstract noun indirectly perceived only through the emotions generated by optical effects. Weller's word not only directs us to the object itself it evokes also to the individual idea that, we, individual spectators autonomous in our interpretations, make of it. Thus, the final understanding of this painting-writing is linked to the idea that we, the spectators, diverse and autonomous in our perception, have constructed of the word in question according to our experience and consequently according to an interpretative key that can be either cognitive or affective. Here the work of Simona Weller leads to a possible reflection on semiotic anarchy and thus suggests a move toward deconstruction.

Simona Weller knows that language alone (understood as vocabulary) cannot reach a level of representation like that of the visual arts. Therefore, she elaborates language in a metaphoric sense. Language needs rhetorical strategies, the metaphors and colours of poetry and painting to arrive at what the word evokes. Weller's word-module immediately recalls the object to which it refers in a more immediate and emotional way than the word itself. Yet at times emotion and passion, though lucid, surpass the word's structure just as affectivity surpasses cognition and, in some cases, arrives at the point where chaos is more difficult to tame. Here the illusion of determinacy enters a crisis and the theme becomes overwhelmingly emotional, impressive, open, infinite and indeterminate. The organising geometry of the interweaving and the structuring rhythm of the lines seem to cede to the general affectivity generated by the incommensurability of the universal element invoked. Finally the eurhythmic articulation becomes symmetrical growth and then pure emotion through optical vibrations, cancellations and superimposition. From a close up of the word to a distant perception of the superimposition, the surfaces of these paintings become an optical effect with vibrations of color and light. Their extraordinary effect suggests the importance of Simona Weller's painting in which the pairing of chaos and control reaches a dialectic tension between enchantment and delirium, cognition and affectivity, the determinate and the indeterminate, the near and the far, the written and the erased, the visible and the invisible.

Calcata, April 2005