Carlo Maria Mariani's eternal cities: in a recent series of U.S. exhibitions, Mariani, a veteran of Rome's avant-garde, pays tribute to New York City, his adopted home. With their Neo-Classical appearance, his idealized figures are unexpected denizens of the contemporary urban environment - Critical Essay - Biography

Art in America, Oct, 2003 by David Ebony

In his refined images featuring idealized, Neo-Classical figures, painter Carlo Maria Mariani evokes the rarefied atmosphere of antiquity and the lush perfection of Arcadia. Yet the artist has little interest in replicating the past and even less in nostalgia. Born in Rome and currently based in New York, Mariani prefers to live and work in big cities, and his paintings address issues pertinent to contemporary art and urban living. Nowhere are these concerns more evident than in his recent series of large canvases and works on paper centered on the theme of the "City," which has been the focus of several gallery exhibitions held in the past year in New York and San Francisco. While these images often include specific references to Rome or New York, the series as a whole may be seen as a tribute to cities and city dwellers everywhere.

Like all New Yorkers, Mariani responded to the events of Sept. 11 in a personal way. At the time, he was working on a group of paintings that integrate Neo-Classical figures with elements of the city's dramatic skyline. The first of the series, The City 1, July 2001, an approximately 6-foot-square canvas, was completed weeks before the World Trade Center disaster. Filling the entire right-hand side of the composition, a giant head with a youthful, androgynous face, flowing hair and idealized features stares directly forward, arresting the viewer with its gaze. The head corresponds to the powerful figures that Mariani has used in his work since the late 1970s as emblems of truth, beauty, perfection and transcendence. To the left, a luminous sky and billowing clouds rise above silhouettes of apartment houses and skyscrapers lining the painting's lower edge. A similar skyline can be seen from a window in the artist's Upper West Side studio. In a departure from Mariani's previous works, the open spaces of this expansive composition seem to invite the viewer into the scene, as if ordinary mortals could bask in the ethereal light emanating from the glorious sky.

The City 1, July 2001 implies both a personal reconciliation with New York City and an homage to its strengths. References to contemporary architecture are rare in the artist's earlier works, and this canvas was painted in honor of the city that Mariani had finally adopted as his home after more than a decade of uncertainty. In 1990, while maintaining a studio in Rome, he began a gradual process of relocating to New York with the help of his wife, Carol Lane, an American art director and curator he met in Rome in 1986. In spite of his limited knowledge of English and difficulties maneuvering through New York's labyrinthine contemporary-art scene, Mariani eventually established himself here. However, the intellectual and emotional ties he maintains with his homeland remain strong.

Mariani's work grew out of the ferment of Rome's avant-garde in the late 1960s, when he explored a wide range of artistic endeavors, from pure abstraction to performance art. He achieved considerable success in Italy in the '70s, and internationally in the '80s, as one of the leaders of a movement to reexamine the possibilities of figurative art. Mariani, however, was never part of the Transavanguardia group. Having honed his skills in Renaissance painting and drawing techniques early on as a student at the Fine Arts Academy in Rome, he made works that contrast markedly with the Neo-Expressionist efforts of most of the artists associated with that movement, such as Enzo Cucchi, Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente and Mimmo Paladino. He also stands apart from practitioners of the later pittura colta or "cultivated painting" and the anacronisti, groups of Italian artists who employ in their works motifs borrowed from ancient art. While Mariani inspired a number of these artists, their interests center on a nostalgic return to the past rather than on antiquity's relationship to the present, which is key to Mariani's art. Although he rarely strays from painting and drawing, his approach to Classical themes more closely parallels that of artists such as Giulio Paolini, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Luigi Ontani, who often quote Greco-Roman art and mythology in their sculptures, installations and photos.

After he relocated to New York, Mariani's style changed little, and at first he continued a series of art-about-art paintings that he had begun in Rome. In Monument to Poetry, a large 1994-95 canvas, for example, Jean-Honore Fragonard meets Jacques Louis David. This composition features a Neo-Classical nude sitting on a swing whose seat is made of two miniature versions of Canova's 1805 marble reclining figure, Paolina Borghese, joined together. A French flag flutters against the nude's thighs as she inadvertently pokes her foot through the strings of an antique lyre, an ancient symbol of poetry that bears the "sunburst" emblem of the ancien regime. Here, Mariani alludes to the French revolution and to the subsequent Neo-Classical movement in art and literature. The nude's apparently accidental destruction of the lyre suggests a wry comment on painting's inability to match the precision and evocative power of poetry.