Critique
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 betweeen classic figurative
references and abstract spatial expression.
Simoncelli's work quickly establishes a precarious equilibrium
betweena 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 memoires 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.