Art: Doing History as Light Opera

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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