The World Through Simona Weller's Sensitivity
Writing is Simona Weller's starting point, but the composition is not developed in the usual manner. The words crumble and come apart, they turn into commas, waves and strokes, often forming stratifications. The words lose their original meaning while taking on a new one, a purely visual meaning which leads to an almost visual type of poetry; they interweave, yet never going back to the previous meaning but leaning towards another, almost geometric kind of organization. For a certain period, Weller approaches Cubism and a certain kind of purism, in search for the "golden section". For another period, she gets involved post in Impressionism, painting a series of pictures inspired by Seurat's Grande Jatte, though using a flat and fragmented image. While the things depicted maintain a trace of naturalism, they are flattened out as if on a written page. There are some slightly ironic and scenographic themes which recall Severini, though they are constantly broken up and fragmented in order to provide an explanation for their being part of this internal structure. There are many reminiscences, a deposit of memories and experiences of life and culture and a constant outpouring of images. Sometimes luminous and sometimes opaque, the images approach one another, they intersect, and overlap one over the other, in search of a compositional structure that almost always settles down logically and plausibly in the end. And all of this is filtered by intelligence and erudition complementing each other but never too openly losing concentration. Ultimately, it is the artist's sense, or rather her sensitivity, masked by an intellectual finesse, that is unmistakably displayed to a greater or less extent.
If we try to analyze or separate a detail, it may look like a troubled sea with tiny foaming waves, or it might be part of a face or a mask or a stylized animal, or a house. But when we look at it as a whole, we can find logical connections between these details, whose background is always the written language, word. Thus the images, too, become fragments of things and fragments of words that stand for those very things. Simona takes her own world of long-pondered images and collects and selects those that emerge and seem to express her thoughts best. It is just so many images and nothing more that she puts on her canvas to compose a balanced whole, which is what gives that sense of completeness to the picture. There is never anything superfluous, however packed the painting may look, nor is there anything less than what is necessary.
The paintings that are closest to the cubist image contain typical elements of that school, but they also have elements created by the artist. There are collages made of fragments of music paper, wallpaper, bits of banisters, lines, and broken and intersecting geometrical forms. But the artist rejects Cubism's fourth dimension and, sometimes, even its third dimension. Everything is flattened, like on a written page, and this is always the ultimate aim of Simona Weller's intent. In an interview she gave some time ago, she spoke of inspiration. To borrow a phrase by Severini, to whom she seems to be related by way of Braque, "you have to be ready to receive". Yet, I don't think one can speak of inspiration in Weller's case. It is just that the things she has seen and experienced, the cultural baggage she has accumulated and the facts of life are filtered through her special way of interpreting things; they accumulate over a period of time, and then the moment comes when the artist feels impelled to put them on canvas. This is the magic moment that many people refer to as inspiration. But I know artists who never feel this experience. They sit at their easels in the morning and work all day like good craftsmen at their trade. Which doesn't mean that they can't do excellent work, even without inspiration!
The world, as filtered through Simona Weller's sensitivity, is composed of an infinite number of motifs, just like the real world we live in. The images are countless and constantly shifting while they are ultimately interchangeable as well. This has nothing to do with the unconscious, as Simona Weller remarked in the interview mentioned above. There is nothing in her painting that is not controlled or sifted by thought. Nor is it a matter of automatic writing or visual poetry: words are so shattered in her pictures, that they take on a totally different meaning. The artist admits to include quotations in her painting, but they are so mixed with dismembered fleeting words that they acquire a whole new meaning and presence. Simona Weller has a strong sense of image structure, which is why everything that looks unstable and fluctuating unfailingly ends up coming together in a solid, precise, concise whole that leaves no space to chance, taking up the form of a finished and even rigorously "closed" picture. The conflicts that take place in the artist's spirit, and in her world made of cultural forms, are ultimately resolved in a single "whole", albeit a "whole" imposed by the artist's will, which though gives the observer every chance for personal digression and interpretation.
Sometimes, her painting softens up and becomes more human, so to speak. Her writing is then just confined to a brief portion of space at the top, almost resembling a signature; the written word becomes more like painting, and the objects - lemons, a basket, piano keys and a book (for the ambiguity that marks Weller's painting)- are meant to be more transparent according to post Impressionist tradition, almost reminiscent of a Bonnard or a Vuillard, so to speak, as in the picture Lemons, Basket, and a Quiver... (the quivers in Simona Weller are few and far between).
Another interesting thing worth mentioning in this artist is that there is no apparent or explicit development. She has set out her world of images, and she never strays, though she may vary it. This reflects her profound belief, and this by itself justifies her vocation as an artist and her rare integrity in keeping faith with her inner life and with her life as an artist.
Calcata, March 1984