An Italian painter's improbable romance with far-away Hawai'i

By Victoria Gail-White
Advertiser Art Critic

•	'Vertical Landscapes': Filippo Marignoli 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 1-5 p.m. Sundays, through June 29 Gallery 3, Honolulu Academy of Arts 532-8701

Later would come an active social life filled with lively friends and fellow artists, regular art showings in prestigious galleries, and homes in Italy, New York, Hawai'i and Paris.

In April 1954, the noble Filippo Marignoli dei Marchesi de Montecorona married Princess Esther Kapi'olani Kawananakoa of Hawai'i. They met in Florence, where the princess was taking drawing lessons from him.

"Why he was teaching it and why she was learning it, God only knows," says Marignoli's son Duccio, "because she has never shown any particular disposition to it."

Duccio, the youngest of three children, more properly known as Duccio Kaumuali'i Marignoli de Marchesi de Montecorona, an art dealer in old-masters pictures, is responsible for guest-curating his father's work and bringing the traveling "Vertical Landscapes" exhibit "back home" to Hawai'i.

"The artist and friend Paolo Cotani asked me what it felt like to research one's father's career," writes Duccio Marignoli in the 95-page catalog for the exhibit. "I told him it felt like an archaeology of the self.

"The emphasized 'science,' the organizing into schematic layerings of the dig, are never capable of hiding the childlike glee of exhuming what is lost, under us, behind us; this process reminds me of the work itself."

Marignoli, a self-taught artist, began showing his work in galleries when he was 25. In 1954 he joined a Spoletan group of artists committed to renewing Italian art after World War II and became an important part of the Informel movement (a European movement akin to abstract expressionism).

In 1959, he moved his family to Maui, and in 1960 exhibited at "The Gallery" in Honolulu.

Of that show, D.G. Asherman (art critic for The Advertiser at the time) wrote, "We hope that Filippo Marignoli will come to consider Hawai'i, as well as his native Italy, home. He can become a vital force in the art world on the Islands. We welcome him, both as a person and an artist. We badly need painters of his calibre."

The Advertiser Contemporary Arts Center of Hawai'i exhibited his work again in 1972.

The innovative "Vertical Landscapes" (painted 1977-1981) is a series of 10 acrylic paintings and two drawings.

The artworks are primarily long and narrow, painted in greens, blues, and white. They are clean, cool, invigorating works that reflect the expanse and order of nature without the distractions of people, animals or flora.

Marignoli paints precipices with a sense of vertigo intrinsic to the long view down the canvas, but he doesn't let the viewer crash and burn. He has marked the canvas with a viewpoint, a thin line that travels the length of the canvas and in so doing, has given us a rope, a map, a lifeline to guide our journey.

In "Profondeur" (Paris 1977), ledges of color bend these long lines at the bottom of the canvas to allow the visual journey to continue to travel in our imaginations.

We are safe somehow in Marignoli's world, adrift but directed to shift into our own abyss of memory and experience.

Sharp, elongated fractures in the landscapes connect the elements of sky, earth and water that slice through formidable blocks of color with white angles. Here, Marignoli exposes the underlying perfection of the universe light energy.

He textures these long fields of color with painstakingly precise, single-colored, narrow rows of brush strokes that evoke the movement of water, as in "Distacco" (Paris 1979-1980), or rain, as in "Ecran" (Paris 1980). And one cannot help but feel, on leaving the exhibit, that one has just come out of a refreshing shower.

Marignoli was a man who did not compromise his integrity, either in his artwork or his personal life. He abhorred becoming too comfortable and downplayed his status as a nobleman.

For every painting in this exhibit "he would destroy about five," says Duccio. "He was very rigorous about saying only what needed to be said, which explains destroying so much work."

"Untitled" (Spoleto 1981) is Duccio's favorite painting (it may be mine as well).

"It has that gorgeousness," he says.

It is a lyrical image, more horizontal in format, suggesting an infinite, deep-indigo, horizoned landscape paved by a margined and ruled page out of a notebook.

"These pieces are not truly abstract," says Enrico Mascelloni (an Italian art critic and dealer in contemporary art), "because there is a landscape, there are mountains. But because Marignoli brought it to the extreme consequences, it is also abstract.

"They are original and do not fit into any historical categories. All of the best artists are always outside of the categories."

Duccio Marignoli and his mother maintain a home on O'ahu.