Stefano Filippi, well-known journalist, writer and art critic reviews the work and artistic approach of Paolo Mariani:
Colors, colors, and more colors. Mixed with memories of distant seasons, with sensations awakened by joys and memories that resurface in the mind, scrolling through the agendas of the past. Echoes of images that transform into flashes of light or sudden shadows. States of mind transfigured into layers of soul, into emotions that are settled but alive, present, capable of inspiring the present moment. Paolo Mariani’s work is a journey through places and the soul, a rediscovery of reality but also of oneself, a navigation in the seas of the heart that are sometimes as blue as the sky and as placid as a festive day, and other times appear torn by irresolvable contradictions, traversed by chills that chase an origin.
Mariani is an artist deeply immersed in life. He himself has lived various existences: student, entrepreneur, pilot, marketing and advertising man, inventor, sociologist, patron, designer. The reality that is given to him attracts him and he plunges into it with all his human load.
He is captivated by the fascination of discovering the meaning of the real, as much in the adventure of handling matter, to the point of creating new materials.
For years, the main activity of this multifaceted artist has been the conservative restoration of prestigious architectural complexes threatened by the passage of centuries. To revive the past and give it a future, Mariani has patented technologies and equipment developed by himself, used in buildings and monuments of the highest historical and artistic value. With his first works, he secured the archaeological excavations in the Veronese church of San Procolo, a stone’s throw from San Zeno, together with the architect Libero Cecchini. The human and professional relationship with the Veronese designer will be fundamental for Mariani’s training, as will the collaboration with Tobia Scarpa, Venetian architect and designer whose objects are exhibited in some of the most important museums in the world. After San Procolo, it was the turn of the Scaliger Excavations with the British archaeologist Peter Hudson.
From there, Mariani’s range of action in seismic interventions and architectural renovations began to extend both in Italy and abroad.
The Uffizi Gallery and the Medici Stables in Florence. The Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza. The Quirinale Palace in Rome. The Cathedral of San Ciriaco in Ancona. The Eremitani church, with the incomparable frescoes by Giotto, in Padua. The medieval towers in San Gimignano. The Papadopoli Palace in Venice with its Tiepolo paintings. But also the Palacio Real de Aranjuez in Madrid and the Military Museum in the Santa Apolónia district of Lisbon.
In his Verona, outside whose walls, according to Shakespeare, there is no world, Mariani has given the city a complete restoration of Juliet’s balcony, the first tourist attraction of the city along with the Arena. Alongside the consolidation, he reconstructed its history and iconography in a volume later translated into English and German. All at his own expense.
Past and present, the two poles that have energized his entire artistic life, have also merged in his professional activity. Wherever he went, Mariani was always accompanied by an inseparable friend: an agenda. A travel notebook in which he jotted down sudden thoughts, fleeting impressions, places of the heart, unfathomable memories that should not be allowed to fade with the passage of time. These are pages on which, day after day, suggestions, sketches, and notes of emotions were deposited. An archive of ideas that preserves and outlines the artistic path. So, when he was maturing the decision to reduce his entrepreneurial activity, Mariani began to give free expression to his artistic talent, developing a very particular technique that he had refined over the years, in the scraps of respite snatched from work. The scraps of time evolve into iconic fragments, bare and essential, which in turn transform into long strips of colored paper applied to the canvas, on which acrylic colors are applied, almost always with a spatula.
It is this mixture that gives shape to the creative path, and this artistic elaboration takes shape without ever cutting the roots that inspired it.
To the point that, in Mariani’s compositions, the signature is accompanied by the precise reference to the day and place that were the source of the work. Indeed, the circumstance itself becomes the title of the painting. “Agenda 1998, Thursday in Trieste, Paolo Mariani 2022”. “Agenda 1998, Paolo Mariani, the bakery with pastry shop, Reggio Emilia”. “Paolo Mariani 2022, Agenda 2000, Versilia”. The link between time, space, inspiration, memory, is inseparable; it is a relationship capable of giving a name to things.
And those who pause before the work of this artist must somehow identify with what he has lived, experienced and imagined, and perhaps even suffered.
For example: “Lazise sunset with phone call”. Sky, rocks, trees are reflected in the waters of Lake Garda while a dark element stands out as if it were a foreign body to the tranquility of the lake, perhaps an unwelcome ring that has torn apart an unrepeatable atmosphere, perhaps a work call that has
brought the artist back to the real world. Or again, “Meadow with buttercups in Malo”. You expect a sweet grassy expanse, a bright green meadow dotted with multicolored plants, especially yellow, and you find yourself with strips of warm and transparent colors climbing upwards, reaching for the sky, with red, squared spots that radiate light and love, symbols of life that pulsates, that sprouts and sprouts again, and nothing can stop it. Or conversely, “The beach of Boccasette”. Boccasette is a little-known beach snatched from the Po delta, which for nine months of the year – when there are no rare umbrellas planted there – is left to the mercy of natural events.
On the canvas, among the infinite yellow hues of the beach, stand out black, irregular strips, sometimes thin, sometimes massive, recalling the irrepressible force of nature. The logs stranded on the shore, the power of the storms, the cordon of dunes, the vegetation that grows untamed in the tongues of land spared by the sand and salt. In the whirlwind of the elements, three red stripes appear, and who knows if in the artist’s imagination they are not the large trunks stuck in the seabed to defend the shore, among the benches that stretch out into the sea. They are the only human element in this uninhabited corner, the only vestiges capable of resisting wild nature.
Mariani’s work is an uninterrupted dialogue between the past and the present, but also an introspective confrontation between himself and the world. Whether he is in a big city or on a solitary coastline, in his landscapes the artist communicates the passion of finding himself in a fascinating place and pays homage to the beauty of what surrounds him and of which he, the artist himself, is not an external and detached observer but a participating subject.
From his canvases leaps into view a life that throbs, that erupts from matter and becomes present, outside of time, here and now.
It is a meditative moment, a pause for reflection free of worries and without nostalgia, and at the same time a new way of revisiting what was through imagination, fantasy, experience. A re-creation.