Charaka Simoncelli

Charaka Simoncelli’s work can be characterized as a decorative and spatial investigation through which a path unfolds that is densely loaded with paper and visual references to memory.

Her work explores an uncertain and yet orderly space, bringing us almost to landscape-like themes recalling the investigations done by Carlo Mattioli in the 1940s, suspended between classic figurative references and abstract spatial expression.

Simoncelli’s work quickly establishes a precarious equilibrium between a background, which is at the same time support and mental space, and a mysterious floating surface, which might be clothing or a strip of cloth painted or deformed by time.

Thus from an unsettling golden magma or thunder clouds, memory emerges as pages from a diary or from a book of memoirs that the artist has found in an antiques dealer.

Alternating with dense and brilliant drops of color which elongate to form stems of bushes or flowers, or triptychs of rose buds are indecipherable writings similar to the cryptograms of Henry Michaux and those mystic and oriental “taches”, which Simoncelli brings with her from physical and mental voyages made in the Indian sub-continent and in the precious and refined decorativism of this world full of light and golden transparencies.

Sinuous and thin, sometimes almost sharp drippings thus cross the wrinkled surfaces of her paper and canvas, in an attempt to simultaneously define and freeze that creative process that at times brings the artist towards the creation of suspended iron landscapes: golden seascapes and Venetian cupolas, damp mountains and lands like the Zoran Music hills, or heaps of sand, almost dunes of dust against ochre or pink backgrounds similar to rock eroded by time or by water.

Simoncelli’s variegated panorama of pictorial works, suspended between an appropriate decorativism and a constant desire to put order and balance in a compositional scheme, recalls an oriental and almost Zen abstraction and evokes painting as a form of meditation and materialization and visualization of the mind and thought.