The Waves' Maker

A minute figure with aqua eyes: Simona Weller has a fragile grace. But nothing in her expression, in her gestures, or in her kind voice ever suggests weakness. What she says, speaking of herself, is clear and reticent at the same time, half way between the temptation of memory and the necessity of running away from it. The small studio in Trastevere (Rome) where we meet for the first time, "doesn't contain anything that is mine", she immediately states. Her first remarks about her own art sound like a prelude of what will find its accomplishment days later in Calcata. There, we will stand in front of a huge lake painting, made with small translucent aquatic tesserae, perfect in a room flooded with the green light of the surrounding hills.

Travels, nature, maternity, writing - these are the main coordinates of Simona Weller's life and art.

"I started traveling when I was very young", she says, "in far away countries like Thailand, when it wasn't fashionable yet. All of a sudden, I went from the quiet and protected college life to the adventure of open, uncomfortable, even dangerous places. I still remember the ship leaving Naples, bound for unknown waters".

The journey and the separation validate her vocation as a painter. Being free and not having to suffer the judgments (and the influence) of teachers and colleagues allowed Simona Weller to "retrace" what she had learned from books in the actual world, such as, for example, a deeper understanding, mind and soul, Gaugin...

"I used to paint frantically during the journey, taking notes and trying to capture what I saw and felt".

By listening to her, we realize how significant this experience must have been for a nineteen year old woman, wanting to "test herself" elsewhere, as a foreigner in a foreign country. "Those were very important years and, in order to understand my future developments one must understand the importance of those times. Many of my current themes had their origin in those years. The shapes with which I work, developed in those spaces as well".

These statements are enforced by the pictures of the "Cycle of the Sea": foam, nocturnal waves and a kind of blue that doesn't evoke ice, evoking instead the warmth of oriental waters. We catch the gesture, ample and slow. We get a proof of the importance of the thickness of thought in this type of art, which is nearly a stratification of the idea on canvas, as stated by Palma Bucarelli.

Early youth has therefore been the basis, the plane on which Simona has erected her real and metaphorical "homes". There have been the weddings and the children, the Umbrian country house where she painted for years, dedicating her days to her pictures and to her kids. There has been another important journey in Egypt, where she discovered the desert, the silence of colour-non-colour, the importance and the beauty of writing, of sign on canvas.

Life and art aren't incompatible then?
"No, they aren't. I think my work proves it. Everything I have experienced is there, where I painted. The enriching, beautiful, but -for a while- painful experience of maternity is deep rooted in my blackboards, in the chalks and childish sentences. The time spent in the country has given me the possibility to physically feel the earth, the growth of the plants, the alternating seasons". Simona's words "transform" concretely into the works she shows me. Looking at the works hanging on her walls, I understand her love for Seurat's technique, her fervent relationship with the air's vibrations. In a big painting of 1974 - long purple waves emerging from a dark net - I experience what she said (and wrote) on the intensity of her relationship with the sea. The title of a 1985 exhibition quotes a line from a poem by Dylan Thomas: "No wave can comb the sea". "It is a fragment", writes Simona, "that has been poking my soul for months". In the words of the text and in the shapes of the pictures, the sea becomes a metaphor for a never appeased painting in a permanent and inexhaustible transformation.

Those who know Dylan Thomas will remember his declaration: "I let an image grow emotionally within myself and (...) then I let it generate another one, that will contradict the first".
This same dialectical freedom, the conscious, declared swinging between substance and concept, are the leading elements of Simona Weller's world.
If no wave can comb the sea, no picture can "comb", can order and define painting.
Art is a sea that swallows and gives back, that creates and destroys.
"I think that my painting one picture after another, is like a wave that forms and re-forms itself, driven by the wind", she says.
Waves are therefore the authentic and in some way unique "figures" of this pictorial and poetic universe.
No wonder then, if the name Weller means "wave-maker" in German and if waves, as in one of Handke's characters, identify with the core of her research.

Rome, September 1989