"De Marinis only needs a biade of grass, a tree, a poppy, a dusty track, a ditch, a path or a bank to build up a complex of elements that design architecture and orchestrate music. And always with his usuai technique of a naturai and profoundly human scene where man is never to be seen, where man is physically absent yet spiritually present with his Pan-like force: slipping away again and again, eluding, but venfying. These are essentially landscapes of thè soul and thè spirit. De Marinis's canvases almost possess an identification between nature and man, between man and nature; almost as though thè painter observed a body or recreated a body; almost as though he portrayed man by portraying nature.
De Marinis's landscapes are anthropized - houses, tracks, ploughed and sown fields, paths and ditches appear - but man never appears: there are no human figures, even as shadows or profiles, or in hints or fleetingly, perhaps to avoid running thè risk of identification, but certainly to denounce man who has abandoned nature; man who manipulates and disturbs nature; man who has forgotten thè sacrality of nature.
The painter forces man out of his canvases, he almost chases him out like a Biblical reference, perhaps to denounce his solitude and soliloquy: a solitude and soliloquy with profound roots and an outlet only in sacrality, in divinity, in thè celestiality of thè sky and in thè white innocence and intangibility of thè clouds." |
