Seduction or disgust? Mariani or Kruger?
As the images above by Carlo Maria Mariani and Barbara Kruger suggest, the intertextual and the deconstructive impulse in recent art leads in two quite antithetical directions.
Painting like Mariani's Compozione 2 (1989), seems calculated to please, tease and appease even the most jaded viewer. At a literal level, this work juxtaposes the voluptuous neo-classical curves of its central figure against an austere landscape of telescopic floorboards designed by de Chirico. At a less explicit level, one seems invited to ponder upon the figure's androgynous countenance, or upon the disparity between its anxious mask and its placid face. Perhaps it would not be entirely fanciful to suggest that at a more symbolic level, Mariani plays with the scatological associations between a urinal, buttocks, and a pile of turd-like bananas.
Finally, Mariani's art-historical references beguilingly juxtapose Neo-Classical and Modernist imagery. One recognizes an Ingres-like nude—which in turn evokes Man Ray's photographic puns—alongside Duchamp's Fountain and de Chirico-brand bananas. Other paintings exhibited alongside Compozione 2 at last year's Venice Biennale contained bodies ornamented with faint, tattoo-like variants of Durer's initials and Beuys's iconography.
Mariani seems very much the master of what one might think of as souped-up metaphysical painting—an adaption of de Chirico's methods, complete with late twentieth-century references, and a lush, Neo-Classical, designer finish. Despite its obvious strengths, such painting seems to elaborate a kind of uncomplicated coffee-table-book intertextuality, with all the ease and charm of a successful evening of Trivial Pursuits.
Deconstructing—or dismantling memorable icons from past and present art, Mariani asks us to play 'I spy' and 'I remember' with pleasure and complacency, happy in the knowledge that we know what's what, and that what's what looks... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline