Art, Summer, Nostalgia

It was summer when Simona Weller returned to Finalborgo. She guided me around town, showed me the tower in via Nicotera 34 where she had lived in the fabulous Seventies; and that bar beyond the city walls, where some of her best paintings first saw the light of day. I knew that in these very places, Cesare Vivaldi -her partner back then- had written some memorable works of poetry, inspired by art, by the fullness of love, by the sufferings of parting; the painful leaving these beloved places and the slow subsiding of the floodwaters of love.
In the summer 2004, Simona was invited to Finale Ligure to present her recent novel Memoires of a respectable painter. The novel had been read by the right people, the same people who did their best to organize this twofold exhibition. Simona magically rediscovered her old friends and found new ones, because in her book she extensively writes about both Finalborgo and Calice. Most of all, her book recalls that very special atmosphere that a group of artists can catalyse toward themselves. An atmosphere made of hopes, expectations, projects, dreams of glory and, why not, an impalpable touch of madness.

As far as I know, nobody has yet thought about historicizing what I would call, without uncertainties, the "School of Calice". And don't tell me that the artists were too heterogeneous in terms of generations and trends. What I believe was important, is that each one of them was able to defend his/her avant-garde and that the "spirit of time" freely inspired the art of these now famous names. Let us not forget that in the cities of the Seventies, art was mainly characterized by a strong political involvement, which often made painting look like propaganda. Between Finale and Calice, artists would be welcomed to a happy island where nobody had to prove anything to anybody else and where the artists (Nangeroni, Reggiani or Scanavino, for example) had already gone through their own "revolutions". By reading through the list of the ca. one hundred and twenty names that passed by Calice, we easily notice that not only was Calice represented by most of the best Italian art but, with some exceptions, nobody had taken the path of an ideology that could in any way mystify their art. By trend groups, Nangeroni, Mauro Reggiani, Capogrossi, and Scanalino himself were linked to a kind of painting that could be generally defined as abstract, being based on pattern and repetition. The younger artists (such as Mondino, Nespolo, Mambor, Stefanoni, Ben Vautier and Weller) were instead influenced by the great innovations, like American Pop Art, which in Europe had ancient roots in Art-Brut and in Dada; which caused the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo, in Rome, to be called Neo-dada.

If we were therefore to find a common line between all these artists, I would call it freedom or spiritual autonomy. In order to fully understand what made the Calice years and its legend so unique, we must focus on the artists' working conditions. The first question we must answer is: what are a young artist's dreams? In order of relevance, these are: to find a space that is appropriate for the artist's expressive needs, i.e. a studio; to be surrounded by a group of supporting friends that will sustain him/her in the times of discouragement; to work with a gallery manager who's is able to promote, defend and circulate the artist's work.

Finale and Calice met these three important requirements, and this helped the development of an the appropriate interest for the area, triggering a certain magnetism toward the two towns. Artists from Milan, Turin and Rome, under pressure because of the impossible rent prices of the big cities, were the first to rent or buy a studio-house. An example of this is the unforgettable pink villa that Mondino managed to rent for an unbelievably low price. It was a typical Ligurian villa that evoked ghosts because of its stuffed animals and of the colonial worm-eaten furniture. As Nangeroni would say, the house looked like its tenant. At the time, Mondino was painting a cycle of paintings dedicated to the mystery of the I Ching game.

The summer of 1970 witnessed the arrival of Simona Weller with her children and Cesare Vivaldi. They too, called by Emilio Scanavino, were accommodated at the Hotel Viola. Cesare had a room where he could write and the "three bambini" (which includes Simona, who had just turned 30) shared a large room with a view on the mountains. On the veranda of that very room, Simona painted her first Ligurian works. In the hottest afternoons, the family would go pick mushrooms in the woods of Calizzano. The children learned to eat snails. One day they captured so many that they did not even manage to take them to the kitchen because the snails had organized a revolt, infesting the whole hotel.

That first summer, the family understood that this was the right place for them. The children could play with the other artists' kids; there were three or four galleries where Simona could exhibit her work; there were painters and sculptors with whom she could to compare her work, confront herself, fight, build friendships. Each group or family found their own links. Simona Weller's family developed a strong friendship with the Nangeronis, but they also spent much time with Mauro Reggiani, leader of Italian abstract art movement and reckless driver, fisherman, ironic man and generous friend. And there were all the others: Nanda Vigo, the Cusumano couple and the D'Ars magazine group; the artists that Simona already knew from the youth collective exhibitions, such as De Filippi, Stefanoni, Mariani, Moncada, Nespolo. Many of them bought a country house on the hills between Finalborgo and Calice.

At a certain point, Simona and Cesare, too, decided to look for a house. By chance, the couple one day met a kind man named Enrile. When he heard that Simona was a painter and Vivaldi a poet, the man felt the urge to show them the attic where he used to find shelter as a kid. In via Nicotera, Finalborgo, he guided them up a very steep staircase. He had an undecided look, he hesitated. When they arrived on top of the tower, he opened a small door, a secret passage and, apologizing, he let them into this "Wonderland".
It looked like the scenography from Boheme. The charm of the place may have been due to the very high and sloping roof, to the exposed beams on the ceilings, the fireplaces, the windowsills made of slate, the niches and the small windows… it was love at first sight, the answer to the poet's and the painter's most romantic dreams. Nothing to compare with the aseptic city homes.

The most interesting part about this was that, touched by the couple's enthusiasm for his childhood world, Mr Enrile not only asked for just a symbolic rent price but he also decided to renovate the whole place at his expenses.

They moved in the following summer. The Finalborgo attic had been quickly furnished with many paintings and many plants. In the first months, Simona painted (on the floor) the paintings that she later exhibited at her first Quadrennial exhibition. The following step was now to look for a studio.

Here began Vivaldi's and Simona Weller's parallel life in Liguria: they would arrive at the end of May to leave at the end of September/beginning of October. Every once in a while, during the other seasons, "pressed by nostalgia" as Vivaldi wrote in a poem, they would return to their house in Finale for a few days. It was a great place to work. Cesare would write poems, Simona would paint her first important works. All the tensions caused by competitiveness and race for success would suddenly dissolve, also because the couple had decided to not have a telephone.

In order to call relatives and friends, Simona and Cesare would go to Bar Ercole at the end of the street (it still stands, but with another name). Once, Palma Bucarelli, who was correcting an interview that she was giving Simona, managed to reach her on the public telephone every day, after sending telegrams.

Liguria was also protecting the couple from the toxins of unsolved professional relationships. When recalling the long Ligurian period, Simona speaks of fulfilment and fullness. She finally had all she could wish for: art, her children, the right companion in the house that corresponded to her taste and expectations. A space filled with imagination and loved things, of views and dreams.

It seemed that this enchanted time was going to last forever. Instead, as often happens when we experience something extraordinary, the two did not feel that that time was about to be over, together with the friendships and the acquaintances that they had cultivated.
One evening, the Italian-Swiss gallery manager Anna Maria Janneret, organized a dinner party in her garden in Bissano. The guest of honor was Andy Warhol, who was spending time in Bissano to write his autobiography in peace. Nobody was yet giving any weight to the great American artist, who showed up with his usual pageboy haircut and an ill paleness that certainly did not make him very likeable at a first glance. His flabby and unsociable look won him the nickname of "Polentina" (porridge), a name given by the children running around him, who were instead healthy and tan.

It was, again, the kids who contested Franz P. when he exposed Beuys's conceptual work: "an old coat and a hat" in the centre of his gallery. Ah, this childish indignation! This is just to say that Calice didn't just host any kind of exhibition. Gallery manager Remo Pastori did his best to present old artists as well as young artist like Simona. Pastori was an eccentric character, a fun mythomaniac who, though young, loved to make others believe that he had lived with the artists of the historical avant-gardes. He was very appreciated by the painters of Calice, so much that they taxed themselves to buy him a Cartier watch as a sign of gratitude.

A born subjugator, he had managed to convince his artists that they should not claim anything from the sale of their works. "It doesn't matter if you sell, all that matters is who you sell to" he would say; or "the collection of a great industrial man is not the same as that of an anonymous expert" and "artists should pay, for their work be part of certain collections, so consider yourself privileged". One day, tired of these sentences that had brought others to feel gratitude towards him and her to feel exasperated, Simona suddenly popped up in Pastori's office. By chance, she noticed a collector leave the office with one of her painting in his arms; there was a check on the desk (that must have been more or less the thirtieth painting of hers that had been sold, and for which she hadn't seen a penny). With an incredible wit, Simona grabbed the check:
- This is for me, isn't it Remo?
- Give me at least some change! - he replied, discouraged and in a thin voice.
Simona Weller gloriously left, laughing.

Two years after her arrival, Simona had rented a former bank building on the river Aquila, just by the beginning of Finalborgo. That became her studio and the place where artists would organize their parties.

In one of his dialectal poems, Vivaldi describes the studio as follows: "Out the window, the green shade of pumpkins and apricot trees; on the white wall, inside, she's working on a canvas where extracts of words get lost like birds in this white air that smells like sea. I look at what she's doing: I see that this canvas is bigger than me, as big as love, it gets lost out the green window, it covers all of Finale."

It is in this very period that we bought Vivaldi's last book of Ligurian poems. Edited by Scheiwiller in 1980, it included a small lithography by Simona on a black background. The last poem of the collection is called "Finale in winter".

"Finale in winter. The palm trees poke the air like sticks, the sea beats and spits, up to the sidewalk. In the moist air life seems to hide. But it's time to return to Rome forever: slowly slowly we fill the boxes that are awaiting us, empty. It's cold and I am good at nothing, more and more good at nothing. I look at your beautiful hands working, busy in the winter, your face of sun that slightly warms up the icy windows and I'm not good at telling you about love."

"It's time to go back to Rome forever", reads one of the verses. I ask Simona why they decided to leave. Was it because she had bought the house in Calcata, much closer to Rome? Was it because someone had died too young and somebody else was gone? Maybe it was because of that flood that had furtively penetrated her studio. Who knows if Umberto Rotella remembers it. Rotella is another one of the gallery managers that Simona loves to remember.

It had rained heavily that year, too much. The stream, dry in the summer, had turned to a river and it had flooded. The road that separated the studio from the embankment was completely flooded; the water probably reached the height of the windows and, from the shutters, it had penetrated inside. Nobody ever understood how all that water could possibly have found its way in. Maybe through the interstices of the windows or from under the shutters. But water and mud furiously penetrated, violating that space made of paintings and colours. The waters reached a height of about one and a half meters, until -God knows how many days later- the sun returned, with a strong north wind; the same wind that had opened the windows, dried up the waters. But the mud stayed, to hide everything. A beautiful golden clay covered shelves, easels and tables with a warm velvety colour. When she opened the shutter, Simona was with Vivaldi and Umberto Rotelli. They were shocked. The show was apocalyptic but fascinating at the same time. It seems that Cesare was singing some poems by Ungaretti, about happy shipwrecks. Simona recalls that, before thinking of her works and of how many of them she had lost, she realized that she had for the first time understood that the ways of art are mysterious. In the end, what she was seeing was a spontaneous art installation and, maybe for this reason, it was so perfect and exciting. There was even a long red drool, left by one of the Windsor&Newton powder colour jars. God knows for how long that jar had floated over the mud to draw that "desperate trace of its path". I was staring, hypnotized at my wounded studio when I heard Cesare murmuring: we really have to leave now!

This summer 2005, Simona Weller is returning to Liguria as the great artist she has become. The places of her youth will honour her and she, through her paintings, will tell the fairytale of those enchanted years. The Chiostros of Santa Caterina in Finalborgo and the Casa del Console in Calice will host many works that were born in these places and that have then grown far away from Liguria, in the hearts and in the memory of the artist that I today have the honour to introduce to you. I am glad to have been able to take care of an exhibition like this one; an anthological painting show which, through colours and poetry, traces the paths that have inspired an artist that on colours and poetry has built her own life.

Rome, 10 May 2005