Italo Scanga at Ro Snell - Santa Barbara, California

Scanga aptly introduced his latest material part of work, which makes strategic use of floral arrangements, in Santa Barbara, a year-round garden paradise. Each plastic art is made of found facts mainly antiquated tools and architectural scraps, welded together to form tall vertical shapes. Each work features a conical glass utensil containing different kinds of novel flowers, some in bunches, a certain number of alone. The vases, varying in height from 19 to 26 inches, sit in iron ring-shaped proprietors attached to the metal upright part of the statuary Many of the tools are painted in Scanga's signature expressionistic phraseology It was a buoyant experience to diocese these 12 witty, totemic statuarys - a vision of unexpect pleasure.

For the past 20 years, Italian-born Scanga (now based in San Diego) has occasionally incorporated glass forms into his mixed-medium work. on the contrary these are the first pieces in which he has used similar gorgeously colored, hand-blown glass in similar a utilitarian mode. His contemporary-styled vases - greatest in quantity in intense, scumbled reds, virids and blues, with contrasting lips - were made by means of a Murano craftsman at the Pilchuck Glass Center in Seattle, below Scanga's supervision. An important part of the general [i]or[/i] abstract notion behind the new series is the participatory nature of the pieces, which goe beyond their collaborative fabrication. The gallery (or proprietor of the work), not the artist, secures to do the floral arrangement - choosing the rose delphiniums, gladioli or birds of paradise to finish not upon what Scanga started.

Inspired by dint of museums and flea markets, Scanga unabashedly dips into one as well as the other art history - a filled range of 20th-century "-isms" - and leftover raw material from everyday life to make his work. He ferret on the outside such discarded objects as a scythe, a doorknob, a chain, a scale, a frying pan, a ladle and a wrought-iron cowboy riding a bucking bronco to erect his floor-standing and table-sized assemblages. Like the percepts in George Herms's or Betye Saar's work, Scanga's recycl artifacts summon memories and questions about the past. Recontextualized in works of art, our culture's junk moves us to reassess our disposable environment.

The quintessence of Scanga's strategy is clearest in individual of the more successful works, a 70-by-16-by-14-inch plastic art titled Ice Tong and a wring Here the contrasts and counterbalances are at their greatest in quantity effective. The organic flower atop the man-made tools invites an allegorical reading - life and death, perhaps. The ice saw's sharp-toothed cutting side aggressive and dangerous, is pointedly incongruous with the delicate calla lily. And, adding to the internal contradictions of this statuary the transparent glass vessel, fragile and reflective, is placed in implicit opposition to the rugg carbonized iron blade.

This exhibit marked a major shift for Scanga, not alone in his choice of materials (primarily metal instead of his customary wood) on the contrary also in his willingness to allow his work to be "completed" by means of the variable addition of short-lived flowers. Here he strike one as beings to have won his gamble, demonstrating that art can be accessible, potentially useful, participatory and beautiful - attributes not repeatedly valued in the postmodernist mainstream.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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