De Maria produces a form of “painting on the edge” between art and life, an interface for social vision that can alternate between the inertia of everyday existence and the intensity of the aesthetic sphere in a movement of delicate continuity. 

Nicola De Maria’s untitled work of 1986 is a “dome painting” that finely interprets the Italian genius loci, where vita brevis et ars longa becomes the emblem made evident by the stratified traces of a great culture that also touches the architecture of everyday life.¹ Baroque is the style that best interprets the anxiety of artistic sensibility to absorb all circumstances in a new harmony. 

This small painting by the Turin-based artist De Maria includes lyrical abstract shapes that are brightly coloured in red, yellow, green and blue. Letters appear vertically, that together seem to form the word “WIEN”. The abstract images always refer to the non-orthogonal shape of a dome, to an interior geometry where nothing is hard-edge. De Maria responds to the urban feast of accumulation with the select feast of painting constructively developed through chromatic operations, carefully pondered and yet full of openings, begun as long ago as the early 1970s, to the point of overflowing onto the wall or into the circumscribed space of a painting such as this one. The power of his colour is never aggressive nor competitive but, if anything, informed by a “nostalgia for completeness”, the artist’s distinguishing characteristic with respect to the gestural hedonism underpinning his creative working process, typical of his generation characterised as the Transavangardia in the 1980s. 

Rather than looming over humanity, this painting seeks to live together with people, to accompany them inside and outside everyday life, like a state of existence made visible that silently works its way into the unadorned dimension of quotidian reality. Friedrich Nietzsche taught us never to shame others. De Maria’s art detaches itself from the logocentric arrogance of Western painting, which hinges nearly always on skill in technique and execution, on the superiority of a process and of a product that is simplistically astonishing. The “dome of painting” is protective and never intrusive. 

The artist is the creator of a “construction of morality,” a space that is defined and “painted” and that involves the viewer but without the authority of the Baroque, which sought to bend the social body. The almost lyrical delicacy of the pictorial operation indicates a different path of contemplation made up of gradual absorption rather than frontal wonder. An architecture as abnormal as painting itself, which silently overflows from the canvases and seems to run noiselessly, like a liquid, outside the set limits with a chromatic ineluctability that suggests an expansive combination of Serge Poliakoff and Paul Klee, both sources for De Maria’s work. 

The skin of painting, the tattoo of signs and colours imprinted by De Maria on the walls of Rome, is highly flexible, expandable and elastic, indestructible and glowing, impervious to any decay. Strong is the industrious artist’s hand as he works on the ancient architecture to transfigure and protect it at the same time. 

It is a precious operation that the artist undertakes. De Maria covers the mute wall with the chromatic sound of an itinerant, nomadic form of painting that touches the spaces of many countries without ever losing its own identity or rhythm. Like music in its imperishable flexibility and constant capacity for dialogue, it can be played anywhere. De Maria produces a form of “painting on the edge” between art and life, an interface for social vision that can alternate between the inertia of everyday existence and the intensity of the aesthetic sphere in a movement of delicate continuity. This is the secular aspect of constant and frenetic work developed on the large and small scale alike in the awareness of an excellent and magnanimous act capable of forging a link between the I of art and the we of the world, as splendidly exemplified by the untitled Cerruti canvas of 1986. 

Achille Bonito Oliva

This artwork was purchased in the 1990s by Francesco Federico Cerruti from the Roman gallerist Erica Ravenna Fiorentini. Along with works by Cucchi and Paladino, it is one in the group of paintings by Transavangardia artists currently in the Cerruti Collection, while various sources recall a series of paintings by Sandro Chia that were located in the offices of the Lit factory in Via Ludovico Bellardi in Turin, whose present whereabouts are unknown. Over the years, Cerruti bought several other works from Ms Fiorentini, including Fiori (Flowers) by Giorgio Morandi (cat. p. 832), Senza titolo (la Gioconda) (Untitled [Mona Lisa]) by Gino De Dominicis (cat. p. 940) and Senza titolo (I sette colli di Roma) (Untitled [The Seven Hills of Rome]) by Enzo Cucchi (cat. p. 938) [Ed.].

¹ This text was inspired by numerous essays by Achille Bonito Oliva on the work of Nicola De Maria, such as A. Bonito Oliva, “Transavanguardia: davanti c’è il bel canto, dietro la tortura”, in Rivoli 2002-03, pp. 29-31 [Ed.].