The Ever Changing Light-Color Extension of the Sea
Since more than a century ago, the theory of Surface has taken over the idea of Perspective; but it is only beginning with Seurat, and even more so with Cézanne, that this theory has evolved into the concept of a continuous open space to be described by means of a particular painting technique, or through straightforward communication. This concept of immediate participation, that transforms space into an echo of time itself, has been brought forward by Giacomo Balla.
It was in 1912, in Düsseldorf, where he had gone to decorate a house for his friends (the Lowensteins) that Giacomo Balla began his "irridescent compenetration", based on a series of chromatic triangular shaped implants. These abstract works, which for the painter represented - above all - a study on the fractioning of light, (meant as energy in movement), are precocious examples of serial art. An art, serial in design, gesture and image, that anticipated the chromatic textures, adopted to a great extent by today's artists.
In Simona Weller's recent works, the influence of the great futurist painter is clearly evident.
In his compenetration, Balla had studied the reflections of light on the surface of a lake and, in her own way, Simona Weller has chosen, as an inspirational motive, the myriad reflections of light and colour on the sea - to the point where she has made it an allegory of her own art; I think - she has written - of my painting pictures, one after another, as a wave that is pushed by the wind to form and reform itself. The sea remains where it is, like art, like painting, always prepared for change, but at the same time unchanging.
Weller began her non-figurative experience with painting-writing. Among her most important inspirational words are sea, grass, wheat. Words whose meaning is linked to the idea of an ever constant dimension yet ever changing space. Writing, for Simona, meant doing, creating and, in its repetitiveness, it had assumed a ritual meaning, embracing on intensely desired and beloved Nature; then, little by little, the graphic lines were neutralized by closed and even smudges and, from 1985 onwards, they were cancelled by small flashes of pure colour.
These new, enthralling emotions and textures -described by Weller in a series of rhythmical cadences creating underlying depths of feeling- propose their lyrical messages through impulsive dazzling, arresting colours which are clearly defined, reminding us of the eternal glories of the Mediterranean sun.
Rome, March 1988