Carlo Maria Mariani at Hackett-Freedman - Brief Article

Art in America, Sept, 1999 by Gerard McCarthy

In his second San Francisco show, titled "Fourteen Compositions for a Female Chorus," Carlo Maria Mariani presented seven recent oil paintings and as many works on paper. In the gallery's main space, two large compositions and four smaller canvases evoked an otherworldly domain of Greco-Roman mythopoetics. Populating these commanding images are idealized, winged divinities and buff mortals. A number of them show a lone female figure who flies or hovers in midair outside a large window.

Mariani's technique, which combines refined drawing and academic polish, represents a spirited resistance to modernist orthodoxy. The meticulously rendered figures and fragments of architecture facilitate a seamless illusion that the gallery space extends into pictorial space, and nowhere is there an indication of photomechanical reproduction.

In Afterlight, a standing winged figure holds a butterfly above the body of a recumbent female nude. The delicacy of the butterfly, an ancient symbol of the soul, contrasts with the substantial corporeality of the figures. However, there is something unsettling about the way Mariani has painted the female figure. She seems to undergo some sort of transformation from the pink flesh of her face to the cool white of her hips. Mariani here suggests an indeterminate state of being, a substance that is neither flesh nor stone. The enigmatic figure also hints at a dichotomy of the mortal and the divine, a duality that Mariani has explored in his work for many years.

The series of what might be described as defenestration images, including Eclipse I-IV and The Empty Night, raises the question of whether the female protagonist in each painting has jumped or was pushed. These suspended figures summon a romantic interpretation of antique sculpture as frozen poetry. Meanwhile, the Classical heads carved on the stone frames around each of the windows indicate the austere recesses of a museum or civic building. Perhaps Mariani's figures have escaped the sepulchral gloom of the museum to revive themselves in the sunny everyday world. In all the works on view, Mariani conjures a sempiternal realm that exists parallel to mundane reality and which is accessible through art, reverie and the imagination.