Conversing with Simona Weller

E.C. - It seems to me that your present work represents a moment of synthesis and survey. Maybe we are getting close to a turning-point…

S.W. - Yes, right now I am actually using all my symbols. "Mine", because I take them from my unconscious, from my experiences, from my culture. This exhibition is called "A sign is the specimen spoken", from a phrase by Gertrude Stein, writer and theorist of cubism. Other sentences of hers also inspired the paintings' titles. These sentences seem evocative, magical, perfect for that I want to paint: "called, each thing shivers a bit…".

E.C. - Do you agree about the turning-point part?

S.W. - Certainly, I am conscious that "I sought, and now I have found" and I like it that you mentioned synthesis. I feel that my work, which is so dense and rich with quotations, is like a river (just like a painting, just like life) in which I have learned to swim. But, as Picasso used to say, I consider painting as a self-therapy; so I would say that I do it especially for myself. Of course, it can also help others by releasing particular echoes or identification possibilities; and this obviously makes me happy. Just like a writer is happy to touch the reader's sensitivity, it excites me to add an eye to another person's sensitivity.

E.C. - Do you think you have reached a creative maturity?

S.W. - I hope so; I believe that a painter's maturity is revealed when his/her control of the human and pictorial mediums becomes one with "creation" (which does not have anything to do with the more general term "creativity").

E.C. - So you believe there is a difference between creativity and creation?

S.W. - Perhaps they are just as different as the critic and the artist... Anyone who uses imagination and talent, intuition and curiosity to enrich his/her life and to love his/her work can be considered creative. The creation process is instead a very, very long and patient search, similar to scientific research, which can proceed by steps, revolutions, inventions, but which only becomes "useful" if it manages to make an apparently dried up branch blossom again, or if it generates a new tree from a little scion. And by tree, I metaphorically mean the great oak named Art, which survives since centuries.

E.C. - Is it then possible to find a critical criterion to diversify expression in general from art in particular?

S.W. - We could probably come very close to this if we tried to identify the various phases of the very delicate process that leads to creation. For instance, think of how natural it is to consider inspiration the process's first phase! I agree with Severini who says that "we must be ready, in order to receive inspiration!". Behind inspiration lies a clot of data, facts, information, a decantation of emotions which only spring out at a certain moment. And this moment is already a second phase, while a third phase could be that imponderable gear which, maybe for an association of ideas, makes you predict the exact result in the composition of a work (which in fact could never be any different from what it is...). A fourth phase certainly concerns the courage -or the need- to compare the work with the outside world, in order to expose the results to others... And we can even point out a fifth phase, which concerns the sphere of feelings; because we need a firmness, a tenaciousness, a strength that are not common, to believe in our work in spite of the trends, of the cultural terrorism, of the obedience to the power and (let's say it, at least once!) despite the fact of being a woman.

E.C. - Speaking of trends, today we can observe a triumph of a sort of "painting pornography"; what is your opinion about this pressing overlapping of the Image over a less gaudy horizontal dimension, which is though more critical and constructive?

S.W. - I think that the artistic event can contain various coexisting factors, even though we continuously witness a sectarian separatist attitude -be it because of commercial strategies or due to political events- which certainly does not favour a fertile circulation of ideas. However, even the most different tendencies have often gone along parallel lines. Also, history has demonstrated that conformists have often auto-sponged themselves out, while the more original personalities have managed to prove themselves right; and not even with so much delay... Abnormal phenomena like the one you called Pornography of Image are the logical consequence of the abuse of "trends and fashion". No one has yet had the courage to say that yawning can lead to jaw dislocation, therefore, for the moment, we can just keep the monsters we deserve....

S.W. - Why do you think that my work contains an optimistic and positive component "in spite of all"?

E.C. - Firstly, I still feel that your work contains a constructive effort, a structural tension that, at least partly, is aligned to the operational line of modern art, whose linguistic models and experimental aesthetics seem today to be going through a crisis. You yourself evoked the crisis of project and of ideology, when you spoke about a phase that is no more based on "research" but which instead expressly refers to Picasso's "I don't seek, I find" concept. Furthermore, because the idea of "self-therapy" allows you to find a new centre, to reach a synthesis, to self-motivate the work… "in spite of all" - i.e. despite the despairing problems concerning the relationship between the artist and society. That, fortunately still allows you to create and confine a living-space, which is certainly not a conflict-free place for escapisms; it is a space where it's always possible to find the anchorage points of a positive attitude.

S.W. - In light of your research on my work, do you think there is a reaction to that "painting pornography" we talked about earlier?

E.C. - E.C. - I think so. More than a reaction, I'd say that I can sense a need to make room for a different equilibrium -certainly not a precarious, illusory or ordinary equilibrium but rather, perhaps, a more complicated balance than those which are today going through the crisis- between the expressive immediateness and intellectual mediation, between the pathos of gesture and the breath of more "stable" forms and, more in general, between memory, imagination and every day reality.

S.W. - Today, the critic aims at avoiding the obstacle of expressing explicit opinions. But don't you think that -if there must be a dialogue between artists and critic-, the critics should also expose themselves?

E.C. - Certainly, but we must make a distinction between the critic's evasion - a common diplomatic expedient- and the authentic necessity to express articulated and complicated opinions. Dialogue requires careful listening and a reciprocal breadth of views. It seems clear to me that there already is a dialogue between us. I am not just saying this because I respect my job: the relationship between a critic and an artist also involves mutual intellectual respect, human attraction and even a bit of "experience". And I think that all these factors are all tightly correlated. A correlation which, in this case, is particularly fertile and rich with meanings. I'd say that it is mainly the critic who grows rich and who gets the most profit and pleasure from dialogue with the work of the artist. In my opinion, your work's pathway doesn't suggest a simple explanation, a straight line. It does not follow a formula, an explicit method, a premeditated and servile coherence. However, I find it very consistent. This questions the ideological myth of research, of the project, of mechanical linguistic evolutionism. But this also confers a certain relativity to those theoretical models which explain everything in terms of rupture, of a mere caesura or catastrophe. And what if the latter were really the path that art is about to take?

Rome, April 1983