Abstract Emotion.
In the mid Sixties Silvana Weiller’s desire for a growing formal freedom was evident in her experimentation with new colours under different lights recalling the iridescences of Balla, Marc or Robert and Sonia Delaney’s work, a demonstration of her strong interest in international artists.
Her work centres on the reproduction of objects which lose their formal structure and are rearranged in order to reach an elegant and defined lightness of translucent games. The outside world is analysed with scientific attention without forgetting the elegant and refined brushstroke which will always remain Weiller’s characteristic.
The spiritualization of the stroke and the choice of art materials is evident in her recent work. The monochromatic colour and the canvas, rigorously squared and of a constant size (80x80), define her paintings.
Thin brushstrokes lacking in figurative elements mark the canvas, almost like evanescent and chiaroscuro weaves recalling infinite spaces.
While searching, always urgently, for inner emotions the oneiric dimension has folded into itself, while the choice of using a single colour applied with a refined technique of conscious brushstrokes exhalts the brightness. The limited and defined size of canvas, the extreme simplicity and the monochromatic rigour reveal the artist’s desire to return to the basic conditions of art-making.
After a long period of transformations and interiorisation Weiller reaches abstractism.
Weiller has slowly removed any references to reality from her paintings whilst maintaining and purifying those elements deposited in memory and awoken by emotions.
The monochromatic simplification will evolve throughout the years into a study, a study of “matter”, of “materials”, with the aim of enhancing and sensitizing the canvas by varying the distribution and thickness of the paint mixture. This experimentation tries to develop new and dynamic compositions underlining a detachment from previous geometrical works. The materials translate the subject of the painting into dense clumps of vibrant colours drawing the colours and the light play into a rough and lumpy paste uniformly distributed on the canvas. By expressing herself solely through the manipulation of the thick and pulsating matter the artist succeeds in establishing an engrossing creativity that will permeate in her work displaying freshness, continuity and wealth. We are faced with a primordial structure, a coagulation of matter which animates the germinal centre and, following a path that at times accelerates at times slows down, enriches the painting with clusters, ripples and dilations in order to lay out the total expressive content of the work.
The artist kneads, moulds, shapes with strength, but especially with conscious vitality in order to bring meaningful tales to life. The dialogue is dense and harsh, allowing no concessions to delicacies, and has a depth of intimacy that can carry “fragments of a briefly-lived life”.
In the 1990s Weiller will return to her chromatic studies with subdued drama where the desire for formal freedom is tempered in evanescent nebula. Differently, her latest work finds fulfillment in the colour white. The roughness of the materiality of the brushstroke of previous years has dissolved into a brilliant and magical brightness that highlights a terse yet elegant and refined language.
The language, filled in poetic connotations can also finds its outlet in poetry. As well but not only. Word and painting have been developed alongside each other by the artist throughout her career. Weiller has conjoined and interwoven them into the undisputable centre of her intellectual and artistic essence.