Before the image, Carlo Maria Mariani’s paintings present themselves as a riddle, an enigma, a visual sphinx that questions the viewer without offering a definitive solution. His works appear lucid, built upon a canon of classical harmony, yet they are dotted with details that point elsewhere, towards further meanings, through symbolic stratifications that beg to be deciphered. It is an Arcadian time, uncertain between myth and history, that Mariani stages: a moment when each figure becomes a sign of something else, an allusion, a fragment of a larger language, extracted and reassembled. This dimension is told through I Segni dei Tempi (The Signs of the Times), a 2019 painting donated to the Museum and Royal Park of Capodimonte by the Carlo Maria Mariani Foundation of New York. This work is at the heart of a tribute exhibition dedicated to the artist, running from April 16 to July 14, 2026, curated by Antonio Martino and Andrea Viliani. It is a concise yet rich exhibition, constructed around a work that exemplifies Mariani’s entire artistic journey, an artist who is both reclusive and central to the international contemporary art scene.
The painting harmoniously brings together two fundamental pillars of Mariani’s reflection: Raffaello Sanzio (Raphael) and Marcel Duchamp. On one side, the illusionistic construction of the Loggia of Love and Psyche at the Farnesina palace, and on the other, Duchamp’s famous Bottle Rack, inserted into the pictorial space as a disruptive element. This juxtaposition creates a circuit breaker of references: Renaissance classicism and contemporary deconstruction meet in a representative and conceptual synthesis.
Eike Schmidt, director of the Capodimonte Museum, commented, “By placing Duchamp’s Bottle Rack within a pictorial and figurative space derived from the illusionistic pergola of Raphael’s Loggia of Love and Psyche, in Agostino Chigi’s Villa Farnesina, then still located in a suburban context, Mariani highlights with particular clarity the profound affinity that links these two supreme beacons of his imagination.”
At the center of the composition, a suspended, almost fetal female figure seems to defy gravity. As Martino observes, it is difficult not to recognize a mythological echo, a reference to Parthenope, the foundational figure of Naples, also suspended between falling and rebirth. The body thus becomes a threshold, a passage between dimensions, while the blue sky that embraces it acquires a metaphysical significance, as if it were the very substance of the soul.
The exhibition expands this core through seven other works from private collections, constructing a narrative that traverses epochs and languages. Antiquity re-emerges in works like Orfeo (Orpheus, 1979) and Ercole che riposa (Resting Hercules, 1976), where classical statuary is reactivated not as a formal model but as a living presence. Elsewhere, as in Composizione 5 or Dopo il bagno (After the Bath, 1989), the dialogue shifts to the realm of the modern, invoking figures like Joseph Beuys and again Duchamp.
Also particularly significant is the documentation of the performance Gentil e Gaia (1974), staged in the Logge of Raphael, where Mariani physically inserts himself into the space of Renaissance painting, holding a real apple in front of the painted one. This gesture clarifies one of the central nodes of his research: the continuity between art and life, between image and reality, between past and present.
Alongside Mariani’s works, the exhibition includes a selection of objects from the museum’s collections – including a small bronze of the Farnese Hercules and plates from the Giovine manufactory – and rare editions dedicated to Duchamp and Beuys, underscoring the deeply dialogical nature of the project.
Born in Rome in 1931 and passed away in New York in 2021, Mariani forged a singular, difficult-to-classify position. Described as “The last of the ancients and the first of the contemporaries,” he inhabited the legacy of art without nostalgia, traversing it with a fully twentieth-century awareness. His interest in theosophy and esoteric doctrines, from Helena Blavatsky onwards, contributes to defining a pictorial practice that is also an investigation into the invisible. Mariani’s research is not about finding a solution but about suspension, the intermediate space between clarity and mystery, between evidence and interpretation.
It is not surprising, then, that Naples, a city where time is not linear but layered, is indicated as one of the most suitable contexts for his work. Andrea Viliani explains, “Mariani, in the halls of Capodimonte, seems to have been there forever: ‘I am not a painter, I am not an artist: I am the opus,’ he declared, indicating that the author identifies with his own work, in which the entire history of past, present, and future art is condensed. In this sense, Mariani was never an ‘anachronistic’ artist, nor a ‘postmodern’ artist, but rather a conceptual painter and, as such, a neo-classicist of contemporaneity. Naples is the habitat for which Mariani’s works seem to have been painted from the beginning, breathing the dense air felt along the Decumani, between the Cappella Sansevero and Caravaggio’s Seven Works of Mercy.”
Five years after the artist’s passing, the exhibition also marks a symbolic return: Mariani had already exhibited in Naples in 1978, at Studio Trisorio, at a crucial moment for Capodimonte – and for the history of museography – when the institution was opening up to contemporary influences, with the confrontation between Burri’s Grande Cretto and Caravaggio’s black paintings. Today, with I Segni dei Tempi, that dialogue is renewed, confirming the possibility of reading history not as a closed sequence, but as an open field of relationships. On the occasion of the exhibition at Capodimonte, the Director of the Pinacoteca di Brera, Angelo Crespi, also announced a tribute exhibition to Mariani that will take place in Milan, at Palazzo Citterio, from October 8, 2026, to January 10, 2027.
