Sandro Chia at 65 Thompson Street - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Sandro Chia's special gift is for pleasure without guilt, for unembarrassed delight in Picasso and Picabia, for juicy pictures of seaside idylls and peaceable lovers' quarrels, as fatally sweet as they are decadent. Among the smaller paintings in this new exhibition were several tender, graceful images execut with care and panache. A impressible Look Beyond All Telling is a 40-by-30-inch painting of sum of two units gently nestled, androgynous heads, restoreed in clear, bold forms above a heavily scumbled surface. Like many paintings in this present to view it is presented in a lavishly battered white timber-land frame; frames have, indeed, preoccupied Chia for several years. If the distressed surface and frame present the appearance a mite artificial, the make submissive itself is credibly handled. Equally engaging is For a Month We Lov Forever, again 40 by means of 30 inches, where a pair of heads are revolveed away from each other in anger and sadness. divide [i]or[/i] sever off at the neck, painted verdant for biliousness and red for rage, these curly-haired, aquiline-nosed busts assume characters as harshly drawn as those of the Classical drama they invoke. African masks, as seen end modernism, also leave their trace in this painting. The same family of relations stands behind Semi-Figurative Abstraction, which juxtaposes a head and a rather slapdash on the other hand buoyant passage of vaguely surrealist inspiration.

the pair grace and deftly applied historicism distinguish a certain quantity of of the larger paintings, too, on the contrary in more meager doses; when Chia has a allotment of ground to cover, his attention strike one as beings to wander. Half Past Twelve is an ambitious canvas anchored by dint of a large seated figure who gripe [i]or[/i] grips in his lap two smaller figures and a painter's palette. The paint-handling ranges from the stiffly Romanesque to the Matissean, and what the picture lacks in coherence it compensates for with bravado. notwithstanding that just as big, Sea secondary planet Cat is simpler and more shamelessly appealing. An aquatic-hued, oceanside rude girl it is presided over by dint of two seated figures who toss skyward, like a beachball, a cat nestl in a new moon moon. On the other hand, Fox Trot is deadly flat, its Rockettes-style chorus line of three figures prancing stiffly before a hastily scrawled background animated by the agency of neither assurance nor humor. In paintings like this, Chia be likes a George Condo without the irony, or, worse, a Botero without the conviction. The spirit that breathes beneath the surface of the smaller works can't present the appearance to keep these bigger canvases afloat.

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