Piante e insetti della macchia e delle garighe mediterranee

We think to understand, but often our thoughts get disordered, each one following its own inscrutable and unpredictable route. Sometimes they collide, but often they cross, giving life to inextricable tangles of images and signs. Well, Simonetta Chierici moves safely in these emotional deposits; she observes, selects, then synthesizes and recomposes them by entrusting them to paper.

No, she doesn't write, she paints. Which, if you think about it, is the same thing. She uses an ancient and difficult technique that some still persist in considering a minor artistic expression, the ideal pastime for amateurs and fragile girls: watercolour. She builds her own works with strength and impetuous frankness, but she takes care of them right down to the detail, to the point of giving life to visually expressed structures, with a primarily mental character, of extraordinary vigor, of full and vibrant suggestion.

Her stylistic vocabulary makes use of spots that blend with spots, of inlays that happily chase each other, of tonal passages that incorporate the effects of light and dark. They are casually emotional brushstrokes, always calibrated, essential and harmonious in the chromatic relationship. The formal and coloristic structures that populate her papers and her collages always surprise; they elicit emotion calmly, without any recourse to empty forms of mannerism.

Almost suddenly, with strength and frankness, Simonetta's art reveals itself to be very close to our common sensibility: her story in images fits into the collective heritage of everyday visions, towards an intense personal universe of human sensations, at times dreamlike, but essentially recognizable and direct, therefore shareable. Her work, as a whole, is not the reflection of a tendency or, at least, of an orientation, but the immediate and direct expression of a deep "feeling" and of the irrepressible desire to tell stories, hers certainly - the more intimate ones - but even more the "non" stories of the natural world that surrounds us and of the lost humanity of our days.

Here then is that the artist's work immediately acquires a clear organicity and consequentiality, despite the strong discrepancy of the individual pieces. In reality, it is not so much the "stylistic unity" that makes her path coherent as the "unity of inspiration", this one completely coherent and linear beyond immediate appearances. From one image to another one perceives a sort of internal echo which brings together and renders similar forms that are in fact distant and even antithetical, whose "sense" however is logical and complementary.

Simonetta Chierici paints, what falls under her eyes in the course of a much more active than contemplative daily life, freezes instants, capturing their realities and paradoxes, tragedies and ironies. In this sense, whatever she does, she is a wholly realistic artist and, indeed, her conception of realism is the most spontaneous and direct possible, i.e. the one on the basis of which all the appearances of reality are already structured in an "aesthetic" sense and the artist has only to record and fix this "understanding" which is present in what we experience, in what excites us. It is not a philosophical position but, on the contrary, almost instinctive. The sources of her inspiration are the act of vision itself and all the sensations that accompany the course of experiences, constituting its pure and disenchanted side.