Marioni wrote the following general statement about his work, which is entirely applicable to this example, whose title is intriguingly based on the famed cave works located in the French Pyrenees region and dating from the Upper Paleolithic period of some 27,000 years ago,:
“It is a rather simple logic that the reason we stretch up a canvas to put on a wall is not for the delimitation of its flatness. We prepare the surface, as all practitioners of the art know, to-be-painted. And the function of the paint itself is to carry pigment. And pigment divides light. So, in one form or another, all paintings are fundamentally membranes of divided light.
“We recognize light only by the division of its wavelengths and in that regard I am working within the idea that we distinguish four primary color groupings within the light spectrum because they are archetypes. Within the thousands of color variations the eye can see, we identify four colors that do not resemble each other. We index them as green, yellow, red and blue; and like earth, air, fire and water, they occupy some primordial identity with the human condition. As archetypes, however, these colors do not have meaning in and of themselves and only acquire meaning in the context of how they are used – as archetypes they have value. So, if you paint green in the same manner you paint red, it may indicate that you are drawing with paint rather than presenting the color. It is the painted quality of the color that determines the practice of painting per se, and in the architecture of actualized painting function follows light.
“What we are beginning to realize is that when we have achieved the full realization of an actualized painting, when we have stripped away all the worldly decor of the day, and come to look upon the unadorned flesh of its body — just paint on canvas — what we see emanating from its body is dematerialized light. The material reveals the immaterial, and the great paradox of our modernity is our expectation that it should be something other than what it is.”
