Writing for Simona Weller
Anybody with a trained eye would move beyond the mere chronological list of Simona Weller's artistic experiences to concentrate on the artist's continuous oscillation between narrative tension, intrinsic in the writer, and that tension related to the emotional nature of form and color. The first is directly implied in the well consolidated creative background of the artist, namely her writer status, which makes her a refined and attentive narrator. Weller's bibliographic production includes
Il complesso di Michelangelo, a book which appeared in 1976; the more recent Ritratto di Angelica and Una rosa nel cuore, dedicated to the fascinating figure of Suzanne Valadon in the Montmartre scene. Her narration is subordinated to a certain analytic rigor addressed to the reader's gaze-the inner eye's capacity to critically observe (like the painter) the world around. Such type of beholding is induced by the visual experience as witnessed in the biography about Angelica Kauffman. These are precious advice for a possible access into an imaginative suggestion which transforms writing into graphic form. Following the ideal, subtly traced in this exhibition, the graphic form conveys its "cohabitation" with writing and becomes more intense when the line is synthesized in the repeated sign of the wave. Such geometric synthesis implies an evocation of a game of voids and solids, of concave and convex forms; in other words, without too many metaphoric preambles, it evokes a sensuality imbued in the natural order. According to Kandinskij, in the world of painting a graphic form holds, beside its autonomous value, a relative element born out of its connection with the chromatic form. The latter is the key which combines the two moments (autonomy and relativity) and brings together Simona Weller's recent experiences. Weller's mid 1970s works, produced in the general dominating climate of American conceptual art, are inspired, though in a chromatic form, by Van Gogh and Seurat's color.
The path of this exhibition begins with the works inspired by Seurat. The large canvas Talatta Talatta of 1978 fully explains the artist's choices, emphasizing both the emotional values of color, related to the symbolist atmospheres of the French painter's canvases (according to Filiberto Menna the beginning of modern art analytic line), and the re-evaluation of the tache or spot as a unity of a graphic code (graphic form) reflected in the lyric titles: Caro Seurat, aspettando un pomeriggio di domenica per tornare all'isola. In this high quality painting Weller seems to observe Seurat, through the Diviosionism of Balla's Elisa al Pincio. Other works in this selected anthology correspond exactly to this time in which the artist discovers her authentic narrative style. Small works, solicited by hidden naturalistic images proposed in the guise of details from post- impressionist art works with taches, become graphic forms (as drawing and project) and chromatic forms (symbolic evidence).
Weller insists on the latter type of form clearing the pictorial field from any figural reference. The idea of banishing any possible referentiality is a choice, which denotes a desire to push the pictorial dictate to the registers intrinsic in lyric abstraction, partially present in those works where writing is given as synthesis of sign and color, or articulated through the reordering of superimposed paper stripes. In this sense one should take in consideration works like Controluce di parole, Nessuna onda può whose formal organization recalls the works exhibited a few years ago in Ravello. The effort here is to provide chromatic form with two compositional values: an absolute one and a relative one recalling, in full autonomy, what had been argued by Kandinskij. The absolute value emerges from the combination of bright colors, almost always in their pure states, providing rhythm to the flickering light effects with minor tonal passages. Such process simultaneously models the surface and circumscribes the field of attention finally focusing on certain details of the work.
This type of choice evokes a narrator who aims at constructing a tale in which he-she meets characters and objects closely.
This is the essence of mental and emotional states epitomized as testimonies of our meeting with "reality": dictates understood as manifestations of our consciousness. Although in the last works by Weller it is difficult to exemplify a relative value, this is, in some way, expressed by the color-silhouette. In certain works, like the two ovals made for this exhibition, the geometric partition of the silhouette is an expression of a temporary analysis of the imaginative dictate. The latter seems to have been solicited by an interest imbued with a naturalist matrix. Such origins induce the artist to schematize the symmetric movement of sea waves, its instability, frozen and synthesized by the continuous references to a silhouette which recalls the moon quarters - a form inspired by the great canvases C'è una casa e l'amore, i figli e il fuoco, gli amici… The reproduction of this last image concludes the catalogue of the 1989 Narni exhibition. This perception is a provisional location anchored at a renewed desire to observe the visible realm, addressing, in the geometric partition, the stimuli offered by certain works dated from the end of the 70s such as Socchiudi gli occhi e guarda… an image distantly interpreted by a writing-sign which evokes Van Gogh and with him the wind of passions. The same passions animate the pages dedicated to Kauffmann, in which transpires a subtle autobiographic profile: a tale which follows a plot and a web of parallel stories, where the passions, which have animated the desire to gaze beyond the eye barriers, come back.
Salerno, December 2000