Reconciled Distance
We are here at the extreme opposite of a tabula rasa -i.e. something with no trace of what was previously reported; the protagonist is in fact a "table" where episodes, memories, notes of words and figures are in continuous motion, accumulated, just apparently in a random way, and interrupted only by the physical borders of the support; otherwise the conversation would last to infinity.
I can only record some general thoughts about Simona Weller's work because of lack of time, according to a modality which is overall tiring but, at the same time, able to stimulate the essence, not taking advantage from theoretical calculation and from the "distance" of a comfortable bibliographic survey, but rather from a somehow more participated haste, due to the need to substitute the others' comforting equipment for spontaneous sensation. In order to do this, I am favoured by my acquaintance with the artist, made of various encounters, scattered out in time but always convincing.
I think that this direct way of working, without schemes or filters, and the "time" variable are the crucial elements of the work in question: the immediateness of the note and its time of realization, the desire to record the moment and its corrections are therefore Simona's central attitudes in her acting as a plastic artist as well as in her parallel acting as a biased writer and biographer of the feminine expressiveness of the past.
The work can therefore be seen as an accumulation of different "sessions" or of different states of being, different needs to record and therefore to tell: regardless of the often impressive size of some works, often very close to that of an art installation, the image they suggest is that of a blackboard -maybe because the black background is a recurring choice- or of a notebook; we are here talking about two spaces that, if we think about it, are on two opposite ends; the blackboard is the common space between the actor and the audience, a willingness of making a path obvious to all; the notebook is private, often hidden to the indiscrete eyes.
In this "mimesis" of contrasting instruments of communication, I believe there is a willingness to make us approach and "familiarize" with a material that can have privileged recurring subjects (as in the recent cycle Letters of an Italian painter to Vincent Van Gogh) or to play on keywords of autobiographical nature, whose declination, in writing and painting, becomes an explicit path of cross-references, even for the stranger.
The protagonists are therefore the privileged instruments of memory, caught in their fragile temporary nature and subject to possible corrections both when writing line after line, as well as when reading the whole paragraph.
We are here talking about two different cases of temporary nature; in the first case -the blackboard - a stroke of duster can erase all "signs" - I am using this word to convey an explicit dialectic equivalence between written word and image - for new possible adventures; in the second case -the notebook- we can see a material which is very close to being a diary, to an internal document, a transitional document, before it is translated into a "completed" product, perfectly made according to the rules of the good manners of communication.
This is certainly a suggestion, probably suggested by the artist, because the work is, by nature and at least in this case, "final" in its being a transparent proof of a procedure determined by erased hypotheses, that are almost scraped off the surface to then be substituted, with a variable time interval, for newinues to consider her privileged reference point.
In the years we can catch a higher or lower evidence granted to the various languages used - writing, handwriting, illustration - in a constant game of precarious equilibriums, which are though explicit in their being portraits of an episode, of a "chapter" -if we speak about narrative metaphor-, of a story whose outlines are constantly uncertain, played upon memory in the first place, and on the need to make some proofs emerge from experience, together with some gathered "echo"; to make it durable in the present, the echo of the "Table" chosen for the occasion, mixing everything for the future of a new reader who may become fond of it, and to therefore make the account, the page of a diary or the blackboard of a classroom become
current.
Milan, April 2005