oil on canvas
200 x 220 cm
2002
NOTES: Signed lower right. Authenticated by Chia Archive and Galleria Alessandro Bagnai, Florence.
EXHIBITIONS/PUBLICATIONS: Talking Paintings, texts by John Silleves, exhibition catalog Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, Netherlands, May 30 – September 28, 2008, p. 25;
Sandro Chia. Storie trascese di teatro latente, edited by Fabio Migliorati, exhibition catalog, Galleria Comunale d’Arte Contemporanea, Arezzo, Italy, 2013, Maretti editore, Arezzo, Italy, p. 39; Sandro Chia, Pinacoteca Comunale Casa Rusca, Locarno, September 9, 2018 – January 6, 2019, ill. in cat.; Sandro Chia. Della pittura, popolare e nobilissima arte, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva, December 16, 2009 – February 28, 2010, National Gallery of Modern Art, Rome, ill. in cat.
PROVENANCE: Galleria Alessandro Bagnai, Florence.
Discover the video of the artwork (right-click on the link and select “open link in another browser window”) https://youtube.com/shorts/L-q6lyGFmwY
Magnetism. Optimism. Rheumatism
In this monumental painting, Sandro Chia filters the entire great tradition of painting and presents it to us through the eyes of a contemporary artist. Chia has a heroic idea of painting: the painter is a powerful deus ex machina who creates imaginary worlds, dreams, magic. He himself has a powerful physical structure and paints himself in his paintings, like the great artists of the past. His is a gallery of visual references that knows no geographical or temporal boundaries: from Giotto to Masaccio, from Cézanne to Chagall, from Sironi to Tozzi to Picasso, always in search of monumentality, heroic energy, the mark of an artist driven by the need to assert himself as in a struggle, an adventure, a challenge. However, his heroes are all too human, whose worlds dominated by magnetism and optimism are sometimes lost in rheumatism.