Simoni_Vanderlinden 01-06-2018

51 1978

Cinque stanza (Five Rooms), 1978

CINQUE STANZA (FIVE ROOMS) 52

53 1978

Cinque stanza (Five Rooms), 1978

54

ESTENSIONE (EXTENSION)

Extensione is a photograph of the artists growing a plant on her head
the artist is clay/ground
the artist as a gardener
the artist is not shaping thigs according to a specific mold
gardener of freedom
her head is like the ground,
the artist as ground
if the artist accepts the material form of her ideas, she also regards them as
dependent upon and subject to the same laws that govern nature: growth and
decay. evolution
this work/metaphor of the growing plant is a way to structure the artist's
thoughts
the figure is based on the fact of the "growing plant" or "growing thing" a
metaphor for evolution. Never mind going into the Latin word. The metaphor
is simply the metaphor of the growing plant or the growing thing.
the artist deprecates extending this figure to a principle of unlimited
progressive development; the vulgar use of the term evolution

the term evolution becomes itself a metaphor for thought that reaches far
beyond its limits in observation.

the wide variety of "growths" from which we derive figures of thought cannot
be unified as a linear series; no growth can forget its growth.

55 1978

Estensione (Extension), 1978-2009

56

ESTENSIONE (EXTENSION)

Mariella Simoni created Cinque stanza (Five Rooms) in 1978 for Galleria
Luigi Deambrogi, a gallery that two years earlier, exhibited Simoni’s works
in its main gallery in Milan. But this time around, the exhibition took place
in a five-room apartment, a couple of streets away from the gallery at Via
Crivelli. The title of the exhibition is the exact description of the physi-
cal characteristics of a five-room apartment. Simoni temporarily took
over the apartment with a total installation that dissolves art into life. Ivy
plants overgrew the poorly furnished apartment. There were some objects
(a white couch, a stool, a tape recorder, a toddler’s shoe, and books) but
mainly plants spreading over the furniture, blocking the windows, and dis-
balance the objects. On one of the walls in the hallway was covered with
handwritten texts and some drawings. The doors to each room remained
half open. With a poetic light touch, Simona evokes human life through in-
animate objects and living plants. It stresses that we exist with objects and
nature in a state of interdependence and reciprocity, for better or worse.
Time and place, living and being, are not always at ease with each other.
The absences, the abandonment, the silences and overgrowing plants are
also means of perceiving life (the living self) as a fractured and contradic-
tory unity. On the one hand, Cinque stanza is a profound meditation on the
act of living, and on the other hand, it questions what may constitute the
limits of life.

57 1979

Cactus, 1979

58

In 1980 in Athens she showed some works in the gallery of Karen and
Jean Bernier. The accompanying texts on the exhibition were contributed
by the art historian Denys Zacharopoulos, from which developed a long-
term collaboration with Simoni. Among other things, he was co-curator at
documenta IX in 1992, where he invited Simoni to participate, and in 2011
he curated her solo exhibition at the Museum Alex Mylona in Thessaloniki.

In the 1980s Simoni exhibited several times in the Galerie Peter
Pakesch in Vienna. In addition to Otto Zitko and Herbert Brandl, she was
in contact with the Austrian artist Franz West. Simoni moved from Paris
to Ghent at the end of the 1980s. In the meantime she lived in San Casciano
dei Bagni and New York and finally in northern Italy.

59

1980

ALL'ALTEZZA DEL CUORE (AT THE HEIGHT OF THE HEART)

In 1980, Mariella Simoni exhibited a chair, a fountain, and botanical sculpture
in interaction with paintings and the architecture at Gallery Karen & Jean
Bernier in Athens. Untitled (Sedia), one of the central sculptures in the
exhibition, consisted of a twisted chair turning around the pillar. For Simoni,
the chair is interesting because it is one of those features that supports,
domesticity and is embodied in it. However, the artist threw the design of
her chair into a wildly dysfunctional yet dynamic adaptation of the common
chair and involved it in a theatrical ambiguity that oscillates between
furniture, sculpture and ensemble. Simoni’s chair seems to spring to a silent
life of its own, twisting itself in circles around the pillar. Its relationship
with the pillar lends the object an additional dimension. On the one hand,
the pillar acts a centrifugal point for the chair, but at the same time it is an
architectural element that was there before the chair as a vertical structure
to support the space; the things around which the chair was sculpted. But
then again, with the charsteric element of architecture, which reinforces the
house and furniture aspect of the sculpture There is a bit of Salvador Dali
being channeled here as Simoni takes the expected and morphs it into the
stuff of dreams. There is also an odd sense of desolation at play as the chair
effectively shuns its intended function and forms an obstruction between
people – perhaps it’s the manifestation of the invisible barriers we put up on
a daily basis, giving a voice to loneliness and frustration. Simoni holds that
what we have in common with the chair is not its physical properties but its
spiritual properties, spiritual properties that the artist works out in material.
What is a carpenter exploring or seeing when he makes a chair? Not just the
basic idea geometry and common physical features of a chair but also the
vary idea of solidity and support, and of domesticity. Simoni is interested in
the chair because those features (domesticity, solidity an so on) are embodied
in it. One thing is for certain, there wasn’t much sitting going on at this chair.
The chair suggested an objet to be used. It constitutes a potential attempt to
give shape to neurotic symptoms. … Unlike Joseph Beuys, Simoni does not
see everyone as an artist, but with her ‘twisted furniture’ she does offer a
vision that vents to personal conflicts or neuroses. She is interested in giving
form to domestic furniture that plays with the mind and the body.

61

Deux Camellia (Two Camellia), 1980

ALL'ALTEZZA DEL CUORE (AT THE HEIGHT OF THE HEART) 62

Sedia (Chair), 1979

63 1980

Sedia (Chair), 1979

ALL'ALTEZZA DEL CUORE (AT THE HEIGHT OF THE HEART) 64

Senza Titolo (Untitled), 1980

65 1980

Senza Titolo (Untitled), 1980

ALL'ALTEZZA DEL CUORE (AT THE HEIGHT OF THE HEART) 66

Lampada (Lamp), 1979

67 1980

Lampada (Lamp), 1979

TITLE / STUDIO 68

Senza Titolo (Untitled), 1980

69 YEAR

Senza Titolo (Untitled), 1980

ALL'ALTEZZA DEL CUORE (AT THE HEIGHT OF THE HEART) 70

Fontana (Fountain), 1980

71 1980

Fontana (Fountain), 1980

72

TAVOLO (TABLE)

In an exhibition held in 1981 at Galleria Franz Paludetto in Turin, Simoni
installed Tavolo (Table), a piece investigating the fragile connections, living
a female life. It is made of white glass and clear silicone rubber tubes, black
silicone hoses, and Primula vulgaris or primrose flowers in a wide range of
colors. The horizontally hanging tubes, and four silicone rubber tubes hang-
ing vertically downwards forming a wire hanging drip irrigation system
(drop by drop). There is no visible connection to a water source; irrigation
seems to be dependant on the condensation of air in the glass tubes. The
title of the piece Tavolo (Table), suggests that the familiar thing with which
the hanging tube system is to be compared is a "table." This metaphor of the
"table" could offer a better scope for describing and discovering the piece,
however, how this table metaphor works is not exactly clear. Table meta-
phors often refer to making connections with others even when it is diffi-
cult, a stage for all kinds of interaction, situated in public space, but it is also
the metaphor for home and hearth. Does Simoni seem to suggest that life
is fragile and (here represented through the delicate primrose flowers as a
representation of female beauty and female reproduction) dependent on the
connections with others, even if difficult? Gallery Luigi Deambrogi, Milan
Gallery Karen and Jean Bernier, Athens

73 1981

Tavolo (Table), 1981