There is a strange lucidity to Carlo Maria Mariani’s paintings, a beauty and radiance of surface and figure that seems more than the sum of their art historical parts.

Mariani is a surrealist: his art is a kind of argument. All of his pictures involve a manipulation of symbols of ideality, presented with sensuous perfection, which gives them an ideality beyond reproach – in a sense beyond interpretation. Mariani‘s painting is thus a celebration of the ideal in art – the seemingly perfect – wherever it occurs. He isolates instances in which it appears.” This is the excerpt from Donald Kuspit in the 1990 Biennale di Venezia catalog about the artist.

The present painting Flying in Spatial Atmosphere, 1989 is an autobiographical leap into space based on Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void (1960), and thus rendered in Klein’s famous blue.