Doing History as Light Opera

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.