Doing History as Light Opera

By ROBERT HUGHES

In New York, the overblown parodies of Italy's Sandro Chia

At 37, Sandro Chia, whose show of paintings and bronzes opened last week at the Leo Castelli gallery in New York's SoHo district, is the most promising of the artists who have emerged from Italy in the past few years, floating to New York City like putti on roseate, gaseous clouds of hype. Because they share the same initial and transplanted nationality, Chia, Enzo Cucchi, 32, and Francesco Clemente, 31, tend to be bracketed together as the "three Cs." In fact they are very different painters. Chia's light-operatic gifts have little in common with Cucchi's mucky, doom-laden earnestness: apoplectic chickens and mud slides in the cemetery, done in umber and black two inches thick. Nor does he seem a forced talent like Clemente, a glib draftsman whose "expressive" pictorial rhetoric is stretched paper thin to cover a paucity of formal skills. (Ah, to be young, overrated and in the Big Apple!)

Along with an assortment of German neoexpressionists and many others besides, the three Italians were packaged in a sonorous phrase by a Roman critic: la transavanguardia, or the "trans-avant-garde." This clot of art jargon, like "post-modernism," means nothing definable. It merely points to a mood of eclectic revivalism, the assumption being that since progress in art is a myth, painting must perforce go crabwise, with many nostalgic glances backward. Under such a vague rubric, Chia looks a very apposite painter. Granted, neither he nor his fellow transavanguardisti get anywhere near the best German art of this generation, epitomized by the grim, magnificently redemptive visions of Anselm Kiefer, 38. Yet it is better to lack the tragic sense than to fake it. If an artist like Kiefer can uncover the sublimated debris of Nazism, one like Chia can do history as comedy, positing his style on the mannerisms of Italian art in the Fascist period. He has an acutely caricatural sense of conventions and some sophistication about how to create a surface. Neither is fully deployed, however, in his present show.

Chia's originality is more notional than real. It depends on the unfamiliarity of the sources he adroitly quotes. How many people in America have heard of, let alone seen, the work of Ottone Rosai (1895-1957), a Florentine painter whose roly-poly figures were part of a conservative reaction against Italian futurism in the 1920s? Chia has, and his rotund bodies--thighs like boiled ham, buttocks like bumps, coal-heaver arms--are straight out of Rosai, though bigger and endowed with a crustier decorative surface.

In the same way, Chia alludes to De Chirico (not the prewar master of strange, oneiric cityscapes, but the De Chirico of the 1930s, with his kitschy antique pretensions) and, more reconditely, to the paintings of De Chirico's brother, who took the name Alberto Savinio. With tongue in cheek, Chia has assembled a whole secondhand wardrobe of classical nostalgia: a painting like Figures with Flag and Flute, 1983, with its bearded sage listening to the pipings of a young musician amid the rubble of some temple, thus manages to be both knowing and undemanding. It evokes complicity; artist and viewer share their camp enjoyment of a dead language.

One of the reasons for Chia's popularity may be that he persuades his viewers that they are just a bit erudite without taxing them with art-historical demands. If those padded boys and dropsical nymphs, dreamily enacting their parodies of Arcadian life, were to assume the demanding criticality of real classical art, it would seem like a breach of etiquette. If the absurd athlete without genitals in Young Man with Red Arm, 1983, a descendant of Mussolinian strength-through-joy nudes and post office murals from Turin to Ladispoli, were to become credible, he would be threatening. But no such thing happens. Chia has figured how to take authoritarian images and render them cuddly, defusing their latent political content. All heroes are organ-grinders. Everything looks so ebullient, juicy, operatic and harmless that non-Italians consider it "typically Italian," like a painted cart or a singing gondolier. Nothing menaces. When Chia paints a crocodile, you suspect that the model was a handbag.

There are times when his work transcends this innate cuteness, when the pressure of quotation builds up into poetry, or when some underlying theme of his preoccupations (usually the conflict between paternal authority and lunky adolescent waywardness) catches fire. At his best he is capable of flights of lyrical painting: Melancholic Camping, 1982, a strange and complicated vista of De Chirican tents pressing in on a tiny figure with rabbit ears, was one of the surprises of the past year in SoHo.

No work of that quality is in this show. Castelli's huge, white, museum-like walls seem to cause painters to inflate like blowfish under stress. Chia ends up painting so big that his parodies of "heroic" figure paintings cease to be parody. They look stodgy and overblown. The drawing is sometimes woebegone, particularly when he does "homages" to Tintoretto in the form of a pair of walrus-Like nudes adrift in a sea of greeny-blue wiggles. The sculpture, fussy in surface and ponderously lumpy in volume, is a waste of bronze. In short, it is time to retrench; if this show turns out not to be a passing phase, a minor artist will be in major difficulty. --By Robert Hughes This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.