Fondazione Biscozzi | Rimbaud in Lecce is focusing in these months on a new and fascinating aspect of the production of Sandro Chia (Florence, 1946), a key figure of the Transavanguardia and an artist of international resonance. The exhibition Sandro Chia. The two painters. Works on paper 1989-2017, curated by Lorenzo Madaro, does not celebrate Chia’s work in a generic way, but delves into a specific and defined territory: his production on paper between 1989 and 2017. A corpus of one hundred works that promises to reveal an “intimate archive of images”, as the press release suggests, offering a privileged perspective on the metamorphic nature of his pictorial language and his constant dialogue with the art history. Lorenzo Madaro, professor of contemporary art history at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts and curator attentive to the reinterpretation of the 1980s – as this exhibition itself testifies – guides us in this interview through the curatorial choices that shaped the exhibition.
Sandro Chia, ph. Federico Cimatti, courtesy Fondazione Biscozzi | Rimbaud ETS
Antonella Buttazzo: The title of the exhibition, The two painters, seems to suggest a concept of duality, perhaps even self-reflection. How does this dichotomy manifest itself in Chia’s work?
Lorenzo Madaro: There is a very intense interview that Sandro Chia gave to Flash Art in the early 1980s, in which he explains to Giancarlo Politi and Helena Kontova that every morning, to find a companion and a battle companion for his daily journey, he opens an art book. There is always this idea of an art that rethinks itself, its borders, its territories and its perspectives. So, the hypothesis is that in Chia’s work there is a constant reflection on images, on their transformations, metamorphoses and contaminations. For this reason, the two painters, cited in the title of the exhibition, are, according to my curatorial idea, Sandro Chia and the other artists from the art history with whom he has dialogued, with whom he has compared himself, with whom he has established a profound path of research since the beginning. Let us not forget that, leaving aside his early conceptual phase, Chia has based his path on a reflection on the image, hypothesizing and building a return to iconography.
“Sandro Chia. I due pittori. Opere su carta 1989-2017”, installation view, courtesy Fondazione Biscozzi | Rimbaud ETS
Transavanguardia marked a return to painting, but with different methods for each artist in the group. What elements distinguish Chia from the other exponents of the movement?
My teacher Laura Cherubini, a great art historian who has also studied Transavanguardia a lot, having seen it born from close up, always tells me that actually there was never a real return to painting, because painting had never left. After all, in Rome there were artists like Mario Schifano and Tano Festa who were painters. So, more than a return, it was a new way of painting, more aware and at the same time intelligently light-hearted. Transavanguardia was an interesting phenomenon for the art system, because for the first time it was structured in a systematic way: there was in fact a schedule of roles in which there were the artist, the gallery owner, the collector and the museum. There are artists who at thirty years old have entered the major museums of the world. As for Sandro Chia’s exhibition history, it is truly epic. My student Simone Melis, who is now the curator of the Paladino archive and worked with me as an assistant on Chia’s exhibition, has reconstructed his biography in the catalogue very accurately, also retracing his early years. Chia exhibited in all the major galleries and museums in the early 1980s, receiving great attention with his work dedicated to a rereading of art history with ironic and irreverent flashes.
“Sandro Chia. I due pittori. Opere su carta 1989-2017”, installation view, courtesy Fondazione Biscozzi | Rimbaud ETS
The exhibition offers a retrospective reading of Chia’s production on paper, but the text you prepared for the press release also underlines the importance of rereading the 1980s as a whole. What are the most misunderstood aspects of that decade that this exhibition helps to clarify?
Today, after having reevaluated the 1960s and 1970s, the time has really come to rethink the 1980s, especially to reread them and also understand their relevance as research. There are extraordinary artists labeled in certain paths, such as Transavanguardia, which, as my friend Mimmo Paladino says, was an intuition and a conceptualization of Achille Bonito Oliva. But this conceptualization could not exhaust the complexity of those paths. Transavanguardia is important because, after Futurism and Arte Povera, Italian art broke out of its national borders in a disruptive way: Arte Povera had also had international success, with major exhibitions such as Live In Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form by Harald Szeemann, but its affirmation in the United States occurred after the 1980s. Transavanguardia, to tell the truth, was the first to conquer America and Northern Europe, thanks also to enlightened gallery owners such as Gian Enzo Sperone, Paul Maenz and Emilio Mazzoli, to whom I owe a lot for this exhibition.
Looking at the works on display, direct and indirect references to the art history emerge, from the Renaissance to modern art. How does Chia work with tradition without falling into quotationism for its own sake?
Sandro Chia rethinks images in a light-hearted and ingenious way. The fundamental point is precisely the possibility that he offers us to reread the images, to rethink scenes that belong to art as well as life. There are figures that move freely in the space of the work, bodies, with a more or less veiled eroticism. Here, we can say that in Chia’s work there is life itself.
Sandro Chia, “Senza titolo”, 2001, tecnica mista su carta, 27,8 x 21 cm; “Senza titolo”, 2014, tecnica mista su carta, 28,6 x 21 cm. Foto Rolando Paolo Guerzoni, courtesy Galleria Mazzoli, Modena
Your curatorial work has often addressed the theme of the historical reinterpretation of crucial moments in Italian contemporary art. How does this exhibition fit into your research path?
For my curatorial path, historical reinterpretation is fundamental because it reconciles a great old love that is for the Transavanguardia, for the 80s and for Chia. Furthermore, it represents a beautiful experience at Fondazione Biscozzi | Rimbaud, a place of excellence with which I have collaborated for a long time: from the President Dominique Rimbaud and his assistant Anna Maggio, to my colleagues of the Scientific Committee Paolo Bolpagni, Dario Cimorelli, Roberto Lacarbonara and to the entire communication staff. Then, I cannot leave out a person to whom I am linked by a long friendship born thanks to Mimmo Paladino, a gallery owner, a collector, an international point of reference in the History of Art, Emilio Mazzoli, the first to bring Jean-Michel Basquiat to Europe, in 1981 in Modena, and above all who lent the hundred works, to me and to the Foundation, for the exhibition. So, this exhibition is «a lucky wave of happy coincidences», as Alighiero Boetti would have said, that is, of many positive aspects.
Looking at the contemporary scene, do you think that the legacy of Transavanguardia and the pictorial language of Chia still have an influence on the younger generations of artists?
Yes, of course. If we think about all the obsessive and compulsive presence of painting linked to the image that is around, it really seems to me that the Transavanguardia is more alive than ever. Consequently, Chia’s work is also unconditionally contemporary.
Info:
Sandro Chia. I due pittori. Opere su carta 1989-2017 a cura di Lorenzo Madaro
22/02 – 15/06/2025
Fondazione Biscozzi | Rimbaud ETS
Piazzetta Baglivi 4, 73100 Lecce
www.fondazionebiscozzirimbaud.it
After obtaining the high school languages diploma, she continued her studies graduating in Art History at the University of Salento, with a bilingual thesis on the Pre-Raphaelites. Since then, she has been actively contributing as a columnist and collaborator with national blogs and with local magazines and TV programs.
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