Wild Pets, Tame Pastiche

By ROBERT HUGHES

A mix of young Italians at the Guggenheim

This is Italian family month in New York museums. First, the Museum of Modern Art's great retrospective of Giorgio de Chirico to fix the paternity, or some of it, and now the offspring, or some of them, at the Guggenheim Museum. "Italian Art Now: An American Perspective" is the latest in the Guggenheim's discursive series of "sample shows" of the current art of different nations. It covers the work of seven artists: three painters (Sandro Chia, Enzo Cucchi, Nino Longobardi), two sculptors (Giuseppe Penone and Gilberto Zorio) and two conceptual/per formance artists (Luigi Ontani and Vettor Pisani). Most of these men are in their 30s, and Pisani, the oldest, is not yet 50.

Clearly, this affair--put together by the museum's deputy director, Diane Waldman--does not pretend to be a full survey of Italian art now. Yet she has tried to suggest the eclecticism of the Italian scene by focusing on its manierismo. Most of the artists are obsessed, one way or another, with pastiche, allegory, narcissistic display, irony and side quotation. They are also inclined to a somewhat dandified and bogus kind of religiosity, which

Waldman--a writer prone to detect the Eleusinian mysteries at the bottom of every rabbit hole--interprets as a recovery of myth. All the work is extremely knowing. Its images, from Pisani's impenetrably hermetic Rosicrucian allegories to Ontani's pale face photographed as Dante Alighieri, in red hood and laurel wreath, all hang suspended in double or even triple sets of quotation marks. One can have quite a lot of pick-the-reference fun in this show without getting much in the way of aesthetic thrills.

When an artist essays a big subject, he tends to overreach: Longobardi's images, inspired by the catastrophic recent earthquakes in Naples, are too wispy and facile to convey more than a veiled pathos, except for one large painting of a skew-eyed lion interrupted in his mauling of a woman by a fountain toppling behind him. Altogether too much of the exhibition is pulpy with triviality. Ontani, who dresses in historical costume or mythological nudity and has himself photographed (not only as Dante, but as Christopher Columbus, Don Giovanni and even Leda), is a natural clown. But as a painter he is fatuous, and his watercolors, full of Donald Ducks and magic mushrooms, would have looked dumb on Haight-Ashbury 15 years ago, let alone in New York today.

There is, however, a strong sculptor in the show: Penone, 35, a strikingly gifted poet of natural processes. His largest piece on view is carved from a huge, continuous square-sawed balk of larch, 39 1/2 ft. high. At first it looks like a dead inverted tree, standing on a pedestal, its branches lopped to stubs. Then one becomes aware that the whole form of the tree has been patiently excavated, by carving, from the sawed block. Working backward into the wood from knots, Penone has raised the buried ghost of the tree as it looked when it was younger. This may sound a simple conceit, but it is not: the finished sculpture, almost "nature" but not quite, also relates in a subtle way to the organic spiral form of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim ramp.

The best-known artists on view, at least to American eyes, are Chia and Cucchi, both of whom are hotly pursued by collectors here and abroad. One can see why Chia, 36, has a following. It is hard either to dislike his work (it is too educated and, often, too funny for that) or be really moved by it (for the same reasons). It is ideal decor for the early '80s, revivalism tempered by well-placed clues of irony. It is chic, like a Fendi fur with metaphysical yearnings. Chia can run up a good-looking, hyperactive surface--all those squiggles out of Cy Twombly and the flecks of color applied in an ornamental parody of futurist "divisionism" are cute as kittens. And his parodical reach is so broad as to disarm hostility.

But a major painter? Of course not; he is a salon wit. Cliche piles on cliche:

Chia's bulgy operatic figures pose like Michelangelos and flourish their tiny daggers at frantic women. He will take a tourist postcard view of the Grotta Azzurra in Capri, render it big, add a floating Chagall girl upside down, add a few written phrases in the manner of '20s Mird, and title the whole pasticcio thus: In Strange and Gloomy Waters If a White Dot Shines If a Child Jumps I Will Approach Her Flight, 1979. Chia's visions may not be very deep, but nobody could accuse him of having a defective swizzle stick.

With Cucchi, 31, the problem is reversed. His paintings--of drowning swimmers and divers (like A Fish on the Back of the Adriatic Sea , 1980), heroes tormented by doppelgangers and harsh schematic landscapes--are elaborately ill-painted in order to support the fiction of terminal earnestness. This, of course, is the main trick in the repertory of neo-expressionist effects, and Cucchi does it over and over again. The best of his paintings here, The Mad Painter, 1981-82, seems to parody this condition; the rest simply deploy their accepted rhetoric of crudity as vitality. Artists of Cucchi's persuasion, wild pets for the super-cultivated, serve many useful ends. One is the recycling of old 1950s adjectives. "Primeval," "raw," "overpowering," "harsh"--here they are again, ready to go, led by "mythic." What could be more ingratiating than what is "uningra-tiating," these days? --By Robert Hughes

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