Carlo Maria Mariani: When the Contemporary Meets the Classical

What happens when a contemporary artist decides to paint as though two thousand years of art history were still vividly present? Carlo Maria Mariani built his career around this provocation. Born in Rome, trained at the Academy of Fine Arts and based in New York from 1993, he became an international figure by reinventing the classical language at a time when the avant-garde seemed to have left it firmly behind. Palazzo Citterio presents The Eternity of Painting, the first major posthumous retrospective devoted to Mariani, bringing together 70 works from the 1940s to 2019. After experiments with Hyperrealism and Conceptual Art, Mariani returned to the figure, filling his canvases with idealised bodies, myths and allegories: images of impeccable beauty that are, in fact, sophisticated reflections on memory and time. Featured at Documenta and several editions of the Venice Biennale, Mariani moved between Neoclassicism, Metaphysical painting and abstraction without ever abandoning the extraordinary discipline of his craft. At Brera, surrounded by the masters of the past, his central question takes on particular resonance: can painting be contemporary precisely because it refuses to forget its own history?