Carlo Maria Mariani at Hackett-Freedman - Brief Article

In his next to the first San Francisco show, titled "Fourteen Compositions for a Female Chorus," Carlo Maria Mariani not awayed seven recent oil paintings and as many works upon paper. In the gallery's main space, sum of two units large compositions and four smaller canvases evok an otherworldly domain of Greco-Roman mythopoetics. Populating these commanding images are idealized, winged divinities and buff-skin mortals. A number of them present to view a lone female figure who flies or flutters in midair outside a large window.

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

In Afterlight, a standing winged figure clinchs a butterfly above the material substance of a recumbent female [i]in puris naturalibus[/i] The delicacy of the butterfly an ancient type 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 have the appearances to undergo some sort of transformation from the pink muscle and fat of her face to the rather cold white of her hips. Mariani here indicates an indeterminate state of being, a substance that is neither muscle and fat 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 devoid of contents Night, raises the question of whether the female protagonist in each painting has pass by a leaped or was pushed. These suspended figures order to appear a romantic interpretation of antique plastic art as frozen poetry. Meanwhile, the Classical heads carved upon the stone frames around each of the windows indicate the austere recesse of a museum or civic building. Perhaps Mariani's figures have escaped the sepulchral gloominess of the museum to revive themselves in the sunshiny everyday world. In all the works upon view, Mariani conjures a sempiternal realm that exists parallel to mundane reality and which is accessible end art, reverie and the imagination.

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