Sandro Chia

by Sandro Chia

This monograph documents Sandro Chia's brilliant career from 1977 to the present day, with reproductions of the artist's oil paintings, mixed media works, mosaics, and bronze sculptures. It also features previously unpublished work from his recent exhibition at the Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea in Trent, Italy.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 8877571209
• ISBN13: 9788877571205
• Release Date: February 2002
• Publisher: Hopeful Monster
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Sandro Chia's bold narrative expressionistic paintings

This catalog of the works of Sandro Chia includes the works in the Civic Gallery of Trento. The catalogue provides a fine selection of Chia's work. Micaela Bertoldi in the introduction makes reference to Chia's painting philosophy that he identifies with the `shipwrecked painter...drifting and sinking amid all kinds of difficulties across the abyss represented by the canvas...a mission with no return.' Chia paints out of the modernist tradition that is influenced by both Freud and Jung, where the blank canvas becomes the expanse upon which the unconscious is projected. Chia, with his narrative abilities, exceptional handling of paint and linkage to the images of the Mediterranean is able to create exceptionally moving drama on his canvas. Chia handles the paint in an expressionist manner, full of energetic brushstrokes, layered upon each other, creating a shallow energy filled space that is psychological space rather than classical and formalistic perspective derived space. The figures emerge and merge with the space, both composed of these expressionistic fauvistic layers of paint. Vittoria Coen's essay on Chia mentioned the tension between spontaneity and reflection in his work. This is classic painting from unconscious content since spontaneity may bypass the conscious mind and create images upon which the artist must reflect and absorb before the next burst of spontaneity places more pigment on the surface. She points out that emotional perception is not always systematic, thus we see in his work vast changes in scale of the images from tiny images to giants, the world as a child might see it. She points out that the creation of form from these spontaneous burst is a characteristic of Chia's work. In the painting `Dionysus' kitchen' we see a negro school boy in sailor suit pulling a tiny female figure on a swing through a vast energy field of flame-like brushstrokes, as if she is pulled from memory, from danger, from the past, while the red and black brushstrokes appear to erupt from a volcano in center canvas. Coen points out that gone is the anger of first and second generation expressionists, replaced with a sense of magic, the magic of childhood. This is very evident since some images may carry a knife but none of the robust, heroic images are knives. I am struck by the male images, larger than life, archetypes of fathers or heroes or gods. They are robust males, full of muscles, big butts, rounded chests; evoking Michelangelo's healthy to overflowing nude males from the Sistine Chapel is some odd way. There is a connection with the magic of Chagall but the magic is different since Chagall's magic is based on dreams of flying whereas Chia's is based on the heroic quest. I am reminded of Joseph Campbell's the Hero with a Thousand Faces, as I see the hero in some chapter of a vast narrative in each painting. An example is the nude red and green hero struggling with himself in a vast field of flying paint rocks in the painting "Passione pe