Biography
Those who know Diego Mariani are not surprised to see him sitting at the PC for his graphic works while he talks about a shutter commissioned to him the afternoon before, while listening to the sounds produced with any object he passes through his hands, being also an excellent drummer.
Perhaps more than ductile he is “greedy”, an attitude recognizable in his pictorial works, where he experiments with different technical situations on equally varied supports.
Diego Mariani (Milan, March 15, 1982) takes his first steps in the field of art with brilliant results since the art school. His father Roberto Mariani and the work of his maternal uncle Alberto Schiavi were formative for the start of his path, which from the beginning has a graphic imprint. The pictorial language of the latter, called "Virtual Art", transforms minimal quantities of color into luminous dust that dissolve and give life to the elements of the picture using traditional pictorial means and at the same time particular supports, creating an incorporeal and floating image, component style that Diego Mariani borrowed above all in his watercolors.
He continues on the path of graphics through visual investigations in the field of advertising, photography and coordinated product image.
In the meantime, he approaches the instinctive nature of Pasquale D'Orlando's abstract drawing, discovering a very personal painting technique.
His works also owe a lot to Aerosol Art and Street Art, of which he is a passionate practitioner, and from which he detects a graphic virtuosity with bright colors.
The lively drafts invest the background with vitality and its streams of color diluted with water radiate emotion on the observer, just as the paints used by the writers light up the urban gray.
The viewer is induced to decipher, under the convoluted veils, the figures that transpire from the background as dreamlike but at the same time real visions, derived from the chaotic becoming of a great metropolis, as his native Milan constantly proposes.
Diego Mariani uses different expressive techniques within the same panel, ranging from vaporous watercolor to pasty acrylic. In his works there remains a graphic linearism that plastically shapes the subjects, sometimes making them project on the surface and transforming them into chromatic substance with an autonomous life that feels the two-dimensional support tight and almost wants to participate in the third dimension.
Even the support is different from time to time: it varies from cardboard to photographic paper abraded by brushstrokes of color, up to the packaging cardboard and low recovery materials, called to live or relive in the world of art after being "baptized "," Elected "by the hands of the author. Its stylistic code is linked to the “contemporary magmatic flow”. The techniques of easel painting are therefore on the agenda, combined with recycled materials, the shells of a society now devoted to consumption.
His works propose visual and autobiographical suggestions captured through rapid gestures capable of immediately showing the viewer the most intimate aspects of the subjects portrayed, but which at the same time are the result of a mental re-elaboration.
