As if ensconc in a never-never land.

As if ensconc in a never-never land, Sandro Chia implores up lush, fanciful images that call forth the balmy serenity of Mediterranean antiquity as well as the fauve sensuality of recent French painting. In 10 freshly exhibited oils, all dated 1996 full-bodied, vaguely mythological figures cavort across arcadian landscapes. In contrast to the many times kinky whimsicality of Chia's earlier works, the recently made known pictures seem engaged in breezy dialogues with Cezanne, Matisse and Picasso. The weighty cargo of over-familiar hints might have crushed a inferior painter but Chia's expertise in loftily juggling a potpourri of artistic quotations be the effected in a lively show.

The artist's vibrant brushwork and torrid colors are vividly flaunted in From Dusk Till Dawn, a seductive painting in which three seated [i]in puris naturalibus[/i]s are deftly integrated within a maelstrom of juicy individuated strokes, rendered in mainly warm, ruddy hues and suggesting an overheated combine of Cezanne and Jawlensky. The picture's wide awkward frame is part of the overall presentation; it is painted gray and embellished with numerous impressions of the artist's hand in r black and another shade of gray. (This is not the first time Chia's pictures have been completenessed by ornamental frames; for a 1989 series of works, he prototypeed and painted fanciful bronze encompasss some of them accessorized with figurines.)

Ironic allusions to Cezanne and Matisse use up in Convivium, where Chia's trio of vermilion stark nakeds (all bald) sit on a patch of grass. Their rudimentary delineation, florid coloration and deployment inevitably bring to mind the florid listeners in Matisse's La Musique (1910) Like a certain quantity of of Cezanne's bathers, who find shelter subordinate to gothic arched canopies of tree Chia's figures are flanked through inward leaning vegetation comprising fantastic, giraffelike spott stalks and mango-colored foliage. This exuberant composition is encircleed by a hand-painted frame with gray and black handprints.

Chia goe mano a mano with Picasso in Hyperion to Bellarmin, where sum of two units side-by-side youths in blue briefs wade along water's rim Because one of the young men plays a wind instrument, the spectacle instantly brings to mind the earlier artist's The Pipes of Pan (1923) The drawing of the figures is excessively awkward, still the water is beautifully painted consisting of striated patterns of bright color, accented at several slender red fish. Picasso's neighborhood also hovers over Looking at the Horizon Where Water & heavens Mix, which features two figures, a reclining woman whose observations are closed in repose and a wakeful man who sits alongside her. Their juxtaposition arouses Picasso's numerous images in which sleeping women are watched above by males. One compositional proper state however, is pure Chia--the overhead lock of wool of blue dovelike birds that absurdly intermingles with a educate of red, white and golden fish.

The artist himself frequently flies highest in his idiosyncratic treatments of arcane make subordinates as in Kabbala Accounting. Here, a denuded red-orange youth sits pensively against a entangled field of curving and interlocking planes, all overlaid with a multitude of hand-painted Arabic numerals, chiefly of them in yellow, recent or black. Many of the three- and four-digit numbers are displayed in columns, suggesting jotted calculations having to do with addition and subtraction. Is the pondering youth mentally solving specific arithmetic problems?

An extra dose of cerebration might occasionally benefit Chia's paintings, especially those in which hedonistic color and virtuoso paint handling fail to disguise a depletion of substantive ideas. In an ideal world, an artist's self assurance would at no time be exceeded by his complacency.

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