Word: castelli
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...abysmal quality of Chia's New York show last winter--whimsies impacted into cliche by the stress of overproduction. This month Clemente is on stage, blanketing Soho with paintings and drawings. He has three separate shows (one more than Cucchi had earlier in the season) at the Leo Castelli, Sperone Westwater and Mary Boone galleries...
...affinity between artist and charlatan. A symbolist with roller skates, he moves very quickly across a vast terrain of appropriated motifs, and the results are usually banal. Even in today's morass of worthless "personal" imagery, it would be hard to find a sillier painting than one in the Castelli show of a green whirlpool a la Poe with a man and his separated genitals disappearing into...
...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...
Certainly Longo is the best of them. But his ambitious split show, which fills two galleries (Castelli and Metro Pictures), displays a worrisome unevenness: harshly accurate feeling one moment, bombast the next. Longo's subject is people under stress; in his paintings, the lid on the urban pressure cooker is always about to blow. He began to make a reputation two or three years ago with life-size figures of men and women apparently in their late 20s, starkly drawn in graphite on a blank ground, twisting and grimacing and staggering. They were, of course, done from photos (only...
Longo is not without entrepreneurial desires. He staged performances, did sculpture and is producing a full-length film, Empire. His art got more ambitious, involving more people both in his pictures and as assistants in the studio. We see the results at Castelli and Metro. They include a large bas-relief in aluminum depicting a horde of struggling Wall Street types: a Roman battle sarcophagus with updated clothes, flanked by ominous, smooth, black effigies of skyscrapers in perspective that recall the architectural renderings of Hugh Ferriss in the '30s. The trouble is that the execution does not carry...