The artist is a visionary, an alchemist of contemporary times, a thinker, the adventurer in a story waiting to be written.
Sandro Chia is all of this and much more, as his life vividly shows.
Earnestly reflecting on the world and its events, Chia never forsakes the recreational sense of art, the irony, and even the humor, that humor “with which God created the world”, as he wrote himself on the catalogue of a recent New York exhibition, where a bronze “thinker” was surrounded by thirty-six drawings relating to its history and geography.
Chia is a citizen of the world, a rebellious spirit who has determined an authentic resurrection of painting. He has done so with great courage, with that ease that is his own, the same ease that today presents us with eighty extraordinary works on paper varying in size, some quite large, where feather-light traits mix with festive colors and a majesty echoing Michelangelo.

Sandro Chia is from Tuscany, and as such, he comes from that school of painting that the whole world sees as Italy’s spearhead, built to stand the test of time. His painting is action and concept at once, and has never been against the anti-painting; his is a thought that takes the shapes it needs, a positive virus where everything is natural, but nothing left to chance.
His collaboration with Alessandro Bagnai comes from afar and has materialized in several occasions, including a splendid exhibition in 1997, in Siena, at Magazzini del Sale.
The exhibited pieces introduce visitors to stations, to the real and imaginative places that the artist pictures by drawing inspiration, as usual, from a thousand suggestions and reflections on art, life and nature.
In 1997, he wrote: “Paintings are infused with joy and sorrow, life and non-life, work, and create a final picture, make room for the possibility of a world that can be pocketed by rehabilitating daily routines. They are born from studies, and planted back into the world like seeds in the ground, thus triggering some global schizophrenia.”
Such reflections, which influenced certain choices of his in the ‘70s, embody the logics and reasons that still stand today, despite the so-called “digital revolution, despite the fact that in Italy a clash still remains between what is ‘conceptual’ and all other ways.”
Chia has lived and still lives many lives, between Europe, the United States, and the rest of the world. He is featured in international exhibitions, has showcased his works in the most prestigious museums in the world, and was among the leaders of the payback of painting after the exhausting experience of conceptual art in the late ‘70s.
Sandro Chia’s painting shows the pleasure of working with vibrant colors and confident strokes, shaped at once by his long experience and a great curiosity that never seems to fade.

The wanderer is the main role in his adventures, a poet, an artist, a scientist, and a researcher. This recalls a large bronze sculpture from 1990, titled Il viandante (The Wanderer), which pictures a sitting wanderer, apparently still, as if waiting for new adventures of the mind.
Travelling means first and foremost thinking.
There is nothing nostalgic in his painting, whose representations of landscapes and backgrounds, animals and things, and humans burst with colors and liveliness. Sandro Chia worked and still works with different techniques and materials, and his unpredictable creativity still surprises us in a world full of shapes, allegories and symbols, living out of a renewed authenticity and freshness, with a certain irony and self-irony that have always marked his poetics. For him, painting “travels at the speed of light”, striking suddenly, like a bolt.
The man, the wanderer, is the focus of the exhibition, in all possible forms: in a “classic” version with a loyal dog, surrounded by penguins or colorful doves, or wearing lively tights in perfect Renaissance fashion.
It is the new man, the modern explorer with curious eyes, an allegory of himself, with no superstructures, no dead weights, no nostalgia.
Everyone of us can possibly identify with these works. Maybe we are wanderers, although not all of us are artists, lost, sometimes puzzled or insecure, other times loaded with renewed hope.

The artist enlightens us, shows us our deepest selves, and does so in a stunning sequence of pictures, unique and serial at once. As I wrote in 2000 for Sandro Chia’s personal exhibition at Galleria Civica d’Arte Contemporanea in Trento, there is an empirical way of watching, and an intellectual way of representing.
Chia’s work leaves no room for reproductions, and it is the absolute in itself. The critic’s role simply consists of accompanying the work of art, reading it honestly, but luckily, the enigma remains, because it is what allows no solutions, what is given once and for all.
A painting hung on the wall, like a crucifix (in Chia’s words) is there for us. It is joy and sorrow, because just like Chia believes, we can distance ourselves from the beautiful, but never from the Sublime.
We need to be open to wonder, free from the laces of common conventions, from the triviality that we carry within for notions that we were taught, and that we never questioned again.
In the magic of color, Chia lets himself be led. It is a color that is suddenly interrupted and then resumed in a flow of energy and vitality that never dies.
The world is enclosed in a palette, and those are its colors, yet the invention displays before our eyes in all its conscious innocence. The color looks as if interrupted by drawings, gestures, traits; it goes in and out of it. All this becomes clear upon reading Intorno a sé (“Around Oneself”), a precious poem collection by Sandro Chia published in 1978, curated by Giuliana De Crescenzo. The incipit reads:

…May a random stain or being made in one go
thus serve some purpose:
the art of dismissing and the art of collecting
are on the same die as collecting while dismissing
and thereby may any hesitation dissolve
and thus may this collection have
this title and blazon:
Around Oneself

In Latin, invenio stands for “I find”, and as I read Sandro Chia’s reflections, I find that I agree with his provocation, as if painting existed regardless of the artist. It is obviously not like that, but it is a constant challenge.
De Kooning used to say that art is a tureen, if you stir a spoon inside, you always find something – almost like a dowser looks for water underground, I’d add. Confronted with this provocation, it is naturally impossible not to think that the 20th century’s greatest thinkers were revolutionary because they got rid of that sacred aura and stepped down from the pedestal of “classic” art. They did so with a necessary, essential adventurous spirit.
Sandro Chia knows well what the word Sublime stands for, he knows its history and the various interpretations given by philosophers and artists. In this exhibition, he once again reaches his peak. He is in and out of the painting.
The wanderer who once was Friedrich’s above the sea of fog makes us think of eternity; Sandro Chia’s wanderer makes us fly forever.