Dressing the Word with Material Painting
…speaking of your work and simplifying the analectic processes of surreal and mnemonic phases. We have known each other since the seventies, with a long friendship begun in Calice, punctuated by your stay at Finalborgo and by the exhibitions at Punto's and Rotelli's. The first works were interwoven with childlike handwriting and from its casualness and your "following the lines", rather than the carrying out of a literary language. It seems to me that precisely this "following the lines" within other meanings has encouraged you to use the written sign as a weft or warp to "write" your paintings, and these are the works that interest me most, even though, in that period, this kind of painting seemed strange while the rest of us were re-working well known materials, and objects and not on a square surface. Today I look at your pictorial insistence with greater pleasure; certainly not because your works have been revalued by the shrewd censors of analects, but because your work demonstrates that creating a picture - today - doesn't necessarily mean that one must seek for inspiration in techniques unknown in every avant-garde from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, and that you can exclude anything which is emblematic, comforting, securely extrovert, "POST".
I remember how, in 1972, you came with Cesare Vivaldi to my wedding as witnesses (you wore an enormous special wedding hat) and how we talked at length of the social problem of the non-admission of women's work to the world of the visual arts, thus in 1976 you succeeded in putting together (I mean you tirelessly collected and edited) all this information. "Il complesso di Michelangelo" (The Michelangelo Complex), with which I disagreed only about the title. Because, for Goodness' sake, to create art is not a complex, but a necessity that should not make distinctions between the sexes. Even if, certainly, a woman may have a family complex, an organisation to which she has been bound by age-old traditions. All of this, however, has not prevented you from painting good pictures and I trust you will continue in the future, going well beyond the retrograde habits imposed upon us by the delirious imprisonment of habit; rather, you should try to embrace the poetry that the sensitivity of your BEING can exalt but never debase! Greetings Simona, and every best wish for your work.
Milan, July 1985