CURATOR’S NOTE

But because my research did not yield much fruit, in the form of a text, an exhibition or a publication, I found myself in a situation where I had gathered a lot of facts about her work, but had found few bridges between the aesthetic aspects of the work on the one hand, and the ideas and life of the artist in general.

When we met, Simoni had already garnered international recognition, which was confirmed in 1992 by an invitation to take part in Documenta IX – the most important of international art events – but her more conceptual and philosophical installations, which laid the foundations of her work in the mid-seventies in Milan and Brescia, were unknown to me at the time. In fact, I had little insight into the complexity of her work. It was only much later that I clearly understood how the meaning of her painting, in retrospect, was situated in her fascination with certain philosophical and psychoanalytical questions, which played a critical role in her life, and which, however, she could not answer by a purely philosophical or scientific method. The feeling was not strange to me, I studied philosophy myself and fully admit that for me, too, there was an inseparable connection between art and “philosophical questions,” at least in relation to visual art, and in particular to installation art. The meaning and pleasure that I attached to art at the time had little to do with the objects and their aesthetic characteristics, as I understand them now. At that time I paid little attention to such qualities, and I can hardly remember that I had my own spontaneous, intuitive preferences for works of art.

What I remember of her early career are the black-and-white photographs the in-situ installation that she made in her apartment in Via Crivelli in Milan in 1978. Simoni had turned her apartment-slash-studio into a space where plants grew ominously over the furniture and books, and shut the windows and window sills from the outside world. Here and there was some sober furniture. The installation was entitled Cinque stanze (five rooms), and was an exact description of the apartment. The conceptual questions raised by this installation had something to do with life or our experience of it. What was once a living space was now overgrown by living plants, life seemed to be the central subject in this installation, not the expressive form of it, but the observation of life. At that time Simoni also worked as a psychologist at the Municipality of Milan, and it is therefore not surprising that observing life was an essential part of her artistry process, not the mundane observing, but what is called in psychology attribution, a process whereby you give meaning through observation. The Cinque stanze installation was not a conceptual work, in that it did not want to conceive of some reality, nor a critical work that provided answers to questions, but rather a form of participation in observation. The things that were in the apartment did not seem to have been placed there, it was as if those things had always been there, and all the artist had done was observe them.

Another instance of Simoni’s real-life observational method, or rather the observation of the life-of-things, can be found in a collection of objects, which she installed in 1980 in Galerie Karen and Jean Bernier in Athens. Furniture was again present. But, this time, architecture, technique, and nature, in the form of water and living plants were involved. Also, this time she did not find the furniture and the objects, but sculpted them herself – a chair, a lamp, a fountain, a door, a painting, etc. – all put in motion and moving or brought to life by some form of energy, either from an electric engine or from a growing plant; a space where nature, art, life, and time confront.

These early installations in Milan and Athens represent a significant position in the work of Simoni. They were made in the late 1970s, a time in which the dominant art movements had somehow come to an end – the end of the modern. It was a moment of confusion. In Italy the Transavantgarde rejected the conceptualism of Arte Povera, and started to reintroduce emotions. Although Simoni was never part of this movement she, too, experienced the liberation of that moment, which was to change the orientation of her work in an unexpected way. The period represents the time when she made her last conceptual works before moving to painting, but they were also the last works made before leaving Italy and turning her attention to the city of Vienna, which by then had started to move out of the shadow of the iron curtain, in anticipation of the overthrow that would change the world at the end of the decade. In Vienna she met a group of young painters and an art scene that by that time had reached a level that attracted international attention. Simoni stayed on and off in Vienna until 1989, when she had her last exhibition at Galerie Peter Pakesch. That was also the year the iron curtain finally fell, and changed the world again. Meanwhile, Simoni moved to Paris where she began her collaboration with the galerist Jennifer Flay, and and shortly after she moved to Ghent for a longer period, where she got close to museum director and curator Jan Hoet and the local art scene in Belgium. From there, her travels took her to New York, and further West to California, mainly to Los Angeles where she participated in a group exhibition at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery.

Increasingly, therefore, Simoni lived her artistic life as a nomadic traveler connecting her to the main art hubs, from the European hotspots Paris, Vienna, Milan, and Athens to the American centers. She never stayed for long spells, but often returned to the same cities. She generally set up a studio in those countries (Austria, Greece, Belgium, France, and Italy), but she never put down roots, remaining a nomadic city dweller. What was new about that, and what would prove to be critical for the way art would develop in the future decades leading up to the 21st century – the new post-postmodern era -, was the notion of a nomadic artist as a nomadic traveler in a globalized world where everything, every place and all past history is available to assimilate and weave together to create a unique identity. Also Simoni’s travels away from home and her nomadic lifestyle shaped the identity of her work, but moreover, they explain what her installations mean for her personally, and for her work as an artist. The original installations of the late 1970s were living rooms often overgrown by plants; the temporary studios she later set up in various places, turned out to be just another type of living room-slash-studio-slash-installation situation, where she now worked on large paintings, and where she became the performer, always putting layers of movement upon her large wooden panels, ongoing movements that went on for long periods of time, sometimes weeks, and hence represent and express the time she spent somewhere. In a way, one could say that her apartment-installation work had now turned into a studio-installation, it was no longer a conceptual piece of art: it became apparent that it was a way of living, with places and with objects, often overgrown, abandoned, but also places where everything is in motion, and where each visit reveals a new form. I see her installations not as conceptual works, but as existential works, as the actual place in which the work of the artist is done, be it the work on a painting in the making or just reading a book, sleeping or thinking the day through. Simoni’s installations, just like her studios, are living rooms, where her life comes alive, or sometimes not, where the living systems of her life are either in balance or out of balance. Many of her studio-slash-installations are places where the forces of her life are pulsing throughout the body of her work. They are laboratories where nature, art, time and living are at ease with each other; places where doors, chairs, benches, paintings, and plants are modeled into installations or sculptures, where objects speak about the continuity of life but also about its imbalance. Her relationship to painting and her temporary living-room-studio-installations across the world became a defining element of her existence. They are representative of a human fate. Places she cannot hold on to, neither put to rest.

The exhibition at Villa delle Rose in Bologna considers all these factors. Located in a historical 18th-century holiday residence, it is both an exhibition and a homecoming. For Simoni will return to Italy with an exhibition for the first time since the late 1970s, and the fact that the show takes place in a former holiday residence seemed to do justice to the story of this artist’s life, and to her on-and-off summer relationship with her home country. Instead of hanging the rooms full with her paintings, I asked the artist to consider bringing back some of her installations, and turn the exhibition space into a temporary home, an installation where her paintings, her sculpted moving chair, books, and ivy and bougainvillea plants re-inhabit the space and connect to the garden. This in turn allowed us to show the many transitions and aspects of her work – as well as the ruptures between the various projects and works.

The publication, with its deliberately simple, indexical format, reflects the primary principles of Simoni’s oeuvre, a life on the move from place to place, from exhibition to exhibition, from year to year and from decade to decade. The central part of this publication contains a chronology in ten chapters, each bringing together works from that period, along with biographical introductions describing Simoni’s exhibitions and works, but also her travels. By combining these types of information, the book traces the many shifts that have marked her long career.

Two reprinted essays in this catalogue concentrate on different aspects of Simoni’s work: Denys Zacharopoulos considers Simoni’s entire career, and Yehuda E. Safran her painting series from the late ’90s and early 2000s. Last but not least, we have chosen to include Simoni’s own voice, and therefore publishing an interview conducted in 2018, a conversation between myself, Lorenzo Balbi and Simoni in which she offers explanations about her work and life. At some point in the discussion, reflecting on her exhibition at Villa delle Rose, Simoni sums up her intentions in a statement – one that I humbly paraphrase to end this text: “Whoever reads this book will hear the sound of the mistral wind, which will wipe out everything to create anew a form against all tendencies towards the easy solution.”