Cecco Mariniello

I began painting quite late, after decades spent primarily as an illustrator for daily and periodical press and children's books. Through painting, I began an artistic journey that follows the path paved by Metaphysical Art and Surrealism, yet is at the same time quite distant from both. The painting I gradually learned to paint is nourished by images in which the boundary between memory and dream becomes blurred, constantly returning to classicism and Mediterranean myth. It evokes architectural spaces that act as a counterpoint to a vital and mysterious nature of sea waters, gigantic trees, and forests. The architecture almost always adheres to a classical scale, sometimes only hinted at or imitated, as in the seaside holiday homes of the past. They are the place of personal memory, of childhood, of intimate shelter, of the light turned on in the warm room while darkness looms outside. But they are also often the place where desire hovers, in the form of an ancient statue of Aphrodite or a flesh-and-blood woman. Beyond the space delimited by walls, balustrades, and windows, wild expanses of beaches and sea, rocks, trees, and scrub-covered hills open up—lands of a much older, boundless, and profound memory where we were algae, trees, and clouds, fish, dogs, and chimpanzees. Between the presence of nature, finally, and the architecture that limits it, offering it to the gaze, one perhaps senses a nostalgia for the beauty that has long inhabited the world unchallenged and that still inhabits it, emanating from the luminous horizons of the soul. Oil paints on canvas allow one to work with intense slowness, obeying the need for painting to emerge and fulfill itself according to its own internal reason.