La Cienega Area

Italian artist Carlo Maria Mariani’s latest large-scale paintings of the Four Seasons continue to be a love affair with the style and subjects of classicism. The figures are the heroically proportioned androgynous nudes of the 15th-Century Roman, Neo-Platonist ideal. They exude a deep reverence for the power of the human form as an expressive embodiment of intangibles such as beauty and natural order.

Mariani gives us the earth’s cycles represented as Classic youths with noble features who reign amid symbols of each season. The most arresting is the cloth wrestling “January” who puts up with the playful torment of two chubby putti with stoic calm. Amid the circular swirl of drapery one masked infant lifts the other toward the God while carefully sketching the large figure’s naked torso on the other one’s back. It’s a whimsical and mysterious invention that locates the artist as commentator and participant both in and outside the historic confines of the painting.

Despite each paintings’ overwhelming historicism in appearance and content, there is still a contemporary freshness to these mixed-media works. The figures are sketched in graphite and areas of thin color wash are laid in on the surrounding vegetation. The artist’s use of colored and graphite pencil to adroitly describe the figures gives the drawing the dynamic of a work in progress. That energy helps revive the languid, muscular youths posed with such metaphoric purpose amid broken sculpture, baskets of fruit and playful putti. In separate drawings of the figures’ heads, Mariani’s vibrant colored line and vivid color contrasts strongly with the immobile passivity of the features. It’s a technique that breaths a little life into the perfectly ordered placidity of neoclassicism. (Michael Kohn Gallery, 313 N. Robertson Blvd., to Dec. 3.)