Joseph Marioni Lot n° 16

Joseph Marioni Blue Painting 1990 Acrylic on canvas 140 x 124 cm. Signed and titled 'BLUE PAINTING Jos Marioni' on the folded canvas and signed and dated 'JOSEPH MARIONI PAINTER 1990' and with material and dimensions. - With slight signs of age. Provenance Private collection, Belgium "The artist's restraint is of almost ethical importance, as it serves to balance the whole. Marioni's engagement with the painting, as cautious as it is respectful, acknowledging the essence of the object without imposing itself, exemplifies a cultivated approach to the things that surround us. The image becomes a demanding counterpart that asserts its own position - its own presence here and now. For all its immediacy of color perception, it always maintains a distance, so that emotional rapprochement and restrained aloofness balance each other out. In view of these tensions between empathy and self-control, which are demanded of the artist as well as the viewer, it is natural when Marioni emphasizes several times in the course of an interview that his painting has a great deal to do with intimacy - an intimacy, however, that is an extremely differentiated one." (Hannelore Kersting, On the Radicality of Joseph Marioni- An Afterword, in: Städtisches Museum Abteiberg (ed.), Joseph Marioni, Malerei, Mönchengladbach 1988, p.47).