Merleau-Ponty's first reflection on Cézanne's painting, presented in the essay "The Doubt of Cézanne", was based on the themes outlined in the Phenomenology of Perception, identifying in painting the most pregnant form with which the silent language of the lived body is made explicit. The secret of painting and sign lies in considering the body as an opening, for its ability to unlock the world of life in which it is immersed and the genesis of the meaning that sustains it:

«Cézanne did not think he had to choose between sensation and thought as between chaos and order. He does not want to separate the fixed things that appear under our gaze and their labile way of appearing, he wants to paint the matter that stands a form, the nascent order through a spontaneous organization. It does not introduce the rift between “senses” and “intelligence,” but between the spontaneous order of perceived things and the human order of ideas and sciences. We perceive things, we understand ourselves about them, we are anchored to them and only on these foundations of “nature” do we build sciences. Cézanne wanted to paint this primordial world, and that is why his paintings give the impression of nature at its origin».

This primordial world of sign and sensation is found in the graphic work and installations of Simona Materi, which declines the multiplicity of flesh through the divergent excavation of matter. In his attempt to unite spirit, intuition and substance, in the search for a concrete organicity and an intimate and hidden sense, in fact, it is possible to intuit a depth of introspective analysis, ambiguous and disturbing, which starts from the line and from the study of the human to open forms to the disharmonious condition of contemporary existence. It is not so much nihilism as intensification of the moment of vision, capable of grasping the world and the flesh as if they were a ray intensified by the light and bodies of things, and for this reason defeated and become phytomorphic and labyrinthine.

His chromatic and structural impressions, clearly depositories of intimate anatomies, are organic hypotheses of depth in the attempt at existential paradoxes since from the experiences of real matter he has learned an immediate and almost violent way of approaching the copper plate, the sheet or the metal. The result is a filamentous and extended stretch as if bodies and things were made of natural fibers in perennial metamorphosis.

The carnality of his art, then, has something inhuman in that it is not the outer envelope that speaks but the inner muscle, the pulp of the figures that modifies morphologies and traces, with nature trying to regain control of space. The logic of sensations produces the formless not as a denial of presence but always as a structure of something profound, which acts between mineral accumulation and pulsation and bodily drive to build anatomies. The excavation – mental and physical as the excavation of the acid and the tip on the slabs – serves to highlight the structures and to bring them back to an inner force that is exchanged between fabric, texture and configuration. Perhaps we are facing a post-organic body even if I appreciate, in the pictorial and graphic expression, that ability to return to become aware of the basics, intuiting imitation as a form of expression that rejects the visible to read the vibrations, vibrations that emerge from the appearances of things.

It is an immaterial genesis that finds an instrument of expression in intaglio, understood as an infinite field of experimentation on the surface and on the plane, and also in the installation where the physicality of the forms acquires three-dimensionality and presence taking charge of the memory of the eye. This relationship between the objects of nature, objects sought and found by chance, the lifeblood of their mineral biology and the heat of color and painting, embodied in the sign in disintegration or in perennial osmosis, leads to a short-circuit between body-involvement-place of collective intelligibility. And since this place is a public space of fruition, the concept of the wearability of the works also returns, since many works also arise from the experience of Materi as jewels designers.

The forms, then, recalling the vegetable flesh of the earth unfold in rhythms, scans, opaque dynamics that are barely intuited, opening to the figures of the body as an identity deposit of the drives. The casts obtained from boulders of the mountains of his land and the maps, like invisible mirrors, that change (and disintegrate) during the exhibition, tell us, at bottom, of the attempt to tell his own personal perception of pain and sensations. As Camus said, “When you can name things, you diminish the suffering in the world.”