One of Italy’s most influential art historians and critics, Vittorio Sgarbi has shared some thoughts on Paolo Mariani’s work. His words offer an insightful and cultured perspective that highlights Mariani’s research and artistic journey.
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Paolo Mariani, The Invisible Echo of the Landscape
It has been exactly one hundred years since the Futurist painter and aviator Fedele Azari created what is recognized as the first aeropainting. The work was titled Flight Perspective, and its composition already foreshadowed the basic characteristics of aeropainting: mobile and polycentric perspectives, simultaneous and overlapping views, with geometric fields that flatten and unfold like fans, cities and countryside reduced to trapezoids, rhombuses, and brightly colored lozenges chasing each other through space. It is, in typical Futurist fashion, the transposition of the pilot’s gaze becoming itself the brush: the earth seen from above breaks into diagonal planes, roofs and roads turn into chromatic schemes, the landscape is no longer stable but a continuous rotation of fragments attracting and repelling each other like forces in tension. No longer the static, contemplative painting of the 15th or 16th century tradition, nor the romantic landscape of early 19th-century painters, but a new, visionary, and sensorial reality: mobile and polycentric perspectives, overlapping views, geometric fields opening and closing like chromatic fans, cities and countryside reduced to trapezoids and lozenges moving through space in a prodigious and fateful harmony born of flight. This vision was perfectly encapsulated in the parolibero (free-word) style of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in a 1941 poem, which evoked “complex pictorial works, internal polymaterial architectures and ceramics to the overpowering, intoxicated sea, dazzling with geometries, cones, triangles, and thundering cavalcades of foam,” and “the convincing plastic forms expressing the rustles, noises, and roars of water and wind assailing steep cliffs above frenzied gravel shoals.”
I don’t know whether Paolo Mariani—trained as a restorer (with major projects to his name such as the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, the Uffizi Gallery, the Quirinale Palace, the towers of San Gimignano, and Juliet’s balcony in Verona), and an aviator by personal history and passion—has ever deliberately studied Futurist aeropainting perspectives. More than a direct derivation, it would seem more accurate in his case to speak of a poetic consonance, perhaps even unconscious or unintentional. As if Mariani might paradoxically be considered a new kind of aeropainter, stripped of the myth of speed and simultaneity—both central to Futurism—but still capable of preserving its most radical core: the intuition that by distancing oneself from the phenomenological data—both physically and psychologically—one can see with greater clarity and synthesize more effectively.
“First Jump at Campoformido – Agenda 1984”
Not a descriptive representation of a landscape anymore, but essential forms that, precisely because they are transfigured, manage to return a more intense and lasting impression of that landscape.
Indeed, the landscape is never depicted pedantically in Mariani’s paintings, nor simply transfigured: rather, there is a kind of transfigured echo, a memory that slowly settles and stratifies like layers of glaze, producing not a descriptive image, but its inner imprint—not a recognizable place, but the rhythm that runs through it and remains engraved in the consciousness.And in this act of translation—which is already poetic before it is pictorial—one recognizes, by affinity and necessity, that same tension that Kandinsky described in his Rückblickerecalling the “unexpected spectacle” that struck him one evening at dusk in Munich, returning to his studio “with a box of paints after having sketched something, still entirely immersed in my dream,” and the sudden appearance of “a painting of extraordinary beauty, glowing with an inner radiance”: “I stood stunned, then moved closer to this painting-rebus where I could see only forms and colors, and whose content was incomprehensible to me,” for—as he would realize a moment later—“it was one of my own paintings accidentally hung sideways.”
Vasily Kandinsky’s 1910 work “First Abstract Watercolor,” housed at the Centre Pompidou, is considered by critics to be the beginning of Abstract Art, even though it is probably not the work referred to by the artist in his text.
A fortuitous mistake, then (the inversion of a painting depicting a landscape), which led him to discover that neither the object itself nor its representation were any longer necessary—that, in fact, they might even “harm painting”—and that the painter’s task was now to ask, with a sense of vertigo and responsibility, “what must replace the Object?”
From this starting point, we also understand Paolo Mariani’s working method, which does not adhere to any phenomenological data, though it does not ignore it. He goes beyond the description of the landscape, yet retains an echo of it—both in memory and in the titles.
The primary source of his work is always his agenda—his inseparable companion on his travels—which, during both professional trips and personal life, collects memories and impressions, places, dates, fleeting sensations imprinted on the artist’s memory. It is not merely a notebook of notes, but a true existential map, transforming lived experience into pictorial trace. Accordingly, even the titles of his works are never mere labels, but real clues: Versilia – Agenda 2000, Meadow with Buttercups in Malo – Agenda 1991, The Green Adige at Castelvecchio – Agenda 2002. Days, places, specific circumstances that surface like personal coordinates, anchoring each canvas to a fragment of experience that, through the painting process, expands into something universal.
From this dialectic arises the dual register that characterizes his work: on one hand, the iconographic trace that links the painting to a recognizable landscape, at least through the title; on the other hand, the introspective dimension that, in practice, dissolves that trace into geometries, colors, and rhythms. Thus, a sunset can be traversed by a dark line (Lazise, Sunset with Phone Call – Agenda 2002), perhaps evoking the sudden interruption of a suspended moment; a shoreline may be reduced to bands of yellow and black (The Beach at Boccasette – Agenda 1991), evoking the blind force of the natural elements; a meadow can rise in vertical surges and red marks (Meadow with Buttercups in Malo – Agenda 1991), as a metaphor for regenerating vitality; a river might flow in layered greens and blues (The Green Adige at Castelvecchio – Agenda 1993), closer to memory than direct observation.
“Lazise – Sunset with a Phone Call – Agenda 2002”
“Meadow with Buttercups in Malo – Agenda 1991”
Mariani builds his paintings through collages of pigmented and colored papers—cutouts fitted together on canvas, then overlaid with fields of acrylic applied using a spatula. It is not paint accumulated but smoothed, softening contrasts and revealing layers, subtle vibrations, transparencies. A visual grammar reminiscent of Matisse’s papiers découpés, but distinct in its destination and spirit: while Matisse celebrated the exuberant vitality of pure form, Mariani suspends the gesture, placing it in a meditative, poetic dimension where matter becomes atmosphere. The papers are not sharp silhouettes, but fragments—shreds interwoven like fabric, constructing inner landscapes rather than vistas..
It is not incidental, after all, that Mariani has worked for decades as a restorer. In his interventions—from the Church of San Procolo in Verona with Libero Cecchini, to the Scaliger excavations with Peter Hudson, from the Medici Stables to the Quirinale, and the restoration of Juliet’s Balcony—he learned to handle fragile materials, to respect their wounds, to preserve their memory without erasing it. This same sensitivity is evident in his painting: the awareness that every layer holds value, that every fragment carries time within it, and that the artist’s gesture is never arbitrary but part of a harmonic construction.
And it is always in this key—moving between time, memory, and the search for an underlying harmony that transcends the forms and appearances of the sensible—that First Jump at Campoformido – Agenda 1984 should be read. The title evokes an extreme experience, and the composition, with its marked verticality and diagonal openings, seems to allude to a parachute jump. Here, the memory of flight becomes more evident, and something of ancient aeropainting seems to reemerge, like a distant reflection of that language that, a hundred years ago, transformed the vision of landscape in modern painting. Thus, between memory and dream, rigor and poetry, unfolds the visual trajectory of Paolo Mariani: perhaps the last of the aeropainters—and at the same time the first of a new kind of landscape artist, one of interiority, where flight becomes memory, and the landscape is no longer a view, but an imprint, a vibration—an invisible echo that continues to resonate within us.
Vittorio Sgarbi
Rome, September 1, 2025