“[...] I don’t use myths as a fundamental category (as in the case of Kiefer), but as a pretext for painting.”

After training in Rome and with a background as a hyperrealist painter, in the mid-1970s Carlo Maria Mariani began to focus persistently on the Renaissance and, above all, the Neoclassical tradition. His solo exhibition Compendio di pittura, held in 1975 at the Studio d’Arte Cannaviello, featured faithful copies after Leonardo, Raphael and Anton Raphael Mengs alongside photographs of the originals. Two years later, at the Galleria Sperone, Affinità elettive presented his work with greater awareness. Indeed, it focused completely on the 18th-century Swiss- British painter Angelica Kaufmann, with revivals, copies and reworkings of her paintings. Accompanied by texts written by Mariani himself, they took on a strongly mental connotation. This practice made him a precursor to that “return to painting” witnessed on an international level at the start of the new decade. Critics such as Italo Mussa and Maurizio Calvesi alternatively coopted Mariani into Pittura Colta and Anacronismo. However, he did not really identify with either movement, instead laying claim to an eminently conceptual style of art. “My work”, he told Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in a 1990 interview in Flash Art, “is not a simple ‘return’, an acritical revival of mythical content inasmuch as I’m not really interested in the content at all. My works are totally abstract and nonexpressive. That’s the big difference. I don’t use myths as a fundamental category (as in the case of Kiefer), but as a pretext for painting.”¹ 

As well as relaunching a style of painting with provocatively academic forms, Mariani’s canvases revive the classical ideal through an iconography with a dignified tone. Apollonian athletes and nudes, gods and demigods, gigantic heads and figures in classical dress returned at the height of the Postmodern period. After the early 1990s, when he was invited to the XLIV Venice Biennale and moved to New York, his iconography expanded: he acquired a more narrative dimension and also began to make use of irony. His figures preserve a strictly Neoclassical look, but start to feature alongside explicit 20th-century revivals (taken from Alexander Calder, Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, and Constantin Brancusi, for example). This combination generates a bewildering dialogue between tradition and contemporary. 

Painted between 1995 and 1996, Arco in ombra (Arch and Shade) portrays an androgynous figure crowned with a laurel wreath, leaping out of a 17thcentury portal. A billowing pink drape flows across its body, blindfolding the figure, concealing parts of its nudity and then whirling up behind it in such a way that it amplifies the shape of the arch above. The figure’s raised left hand holds the shape of Great Britain like a kite: Mariani pays tribute to the land of Romanticism, whose poets and writers continue to inspire him despite being so distant in time. The frontal layout of the scene really stands out, slightly foreshortened by the view from beneath. The symmetrical architecture - freely inspired by the façade of Santa Maria in Portico in Campitelli (fig. 1) - is broken by the intrusion of a figure that, in its polished anatomy and dynamic pose, recalls both Raphael and William Blake (references are never clear in Mariani, but always alluded to, figs. 2, 3). The painting is rich in nuances, highly finished in every detail, while also rapid and almost concise in application. 

In spring 1996, Arco in ombra was exhibited in the artist’s solo exhibition Ossequiose eresie at the Studio d’Arte Cannaviello. This was the same gallery, which had since moved from Rome to Milan, where the artist had made his debut with his solo exhibition Iper/ri/cognizione twenty-three years earlier. Presented in the catalogue by Laura Cherubini, the exhibition comprised around twenty small works that had all been painted recently. This is when the painting was purchased by Cerruti, who must have recognised the ideal continuation of de Chirico’s vision and his timeless dimension in Mariani’s stubborn practice of painting. 

Fabio Belloni 

¹ Christov-Bakargiev 1990, p. 88.