Word: chia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...York, the overblown parodies of Italy's Sandro Chia...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...