The central and most surprising core of the Sandro Chia exhibition at Galleria Maggiore in Bologna is the group of ceramic works produced at the Bottega Gatti on the occasion of the show “Sandro Chia. Ceramica vs Disegno 1:0”, held last spring at the International Museum of Ceramics in Faenza. These include globes and books, but above all large coloured frames, made of ceramic, inside which paintings and drawings are displayed.
The drawings and paintings, as highlighted in the press release, “revive Chia’s passion for the interplay of quotations, memories and references that blur the distinctions between high culture and popular culture, shedding light on an iconographic universe that feeds indiscriminately on the ancient as well as the modern, and that draws inspiration with lightness and irony from a broad artistic territory. The forms of the figures animating the canvases, often so imposing, contradict the canons of harmony, and the same is true of the colours, so sharp and so bright. In this way the works become a visual and narrative collision.”
It is a useful exhibition at a moment like this, when many young artists are retracing the various styles of painting—from abstraction to figuration—while engaging in an endless experimentation with the supports that carry it. It is, in such circumstances, interesting to try to relate some of these young painters, able to revive certain stylistic features or themes of the Transavanguardia, to artists such as Chia.
