Christ Painting

Andrea Cardia by Prof Sergio Rossi Chair Art History "La Sapienza" University Rome In my opinion, Andrea Cardia is nowadays one among the most visionary, creative and powerful - but also unrecognized - young (today you are young even if you are 40 years old) Italian artists. And these 2 apparently contradictory things, actually get on very well: indeed Cardia is "unrecognised", that is voluntary ignored by the circuits of galleries, critics, exhibitions and public Institutions that matter just because he is so stubbornly visionary, creative, powerfully restless and solitary. But considering that in my turn, I do not usually attend the above mentioned places - and not for arrogance but only because I think that they must be one of the means and not the obsessive end of the activity of art historians and critics or of the artists themselves - I am particularly in tune with Cardia and perfectly qualified to praise him highly (in a critical way). At a first sight, rather than to the Italian neo-expressionism, Cardia relates to the German neo-expressionism of the so called "new savages", Richter, Polke, Baselitz who came back to the sources of their tradition proposing a new way to reread the Expressionism of the beginning of the century; but this is just a first impression because actually we find in Cardia an anchorage to the Italian classical tradition and to the early 20th century tradition that certainly was not present in the "new savages" and that qualifies Cardia as an authentic "Mediterranean" representative. He divided his production in a series of chapters - as if it is a novel whose end is still open - Ominidi, Donne, Paesaggi umani, L'anima scabra, that tell about an abused and doleful humanity who dostoevskijly comes out from the soul subsoil, but who is eternally searching for a possible redemption. His paintings are mostly dominated by huge, almost monochromatic figures, frequently seen backwards, flesh-coloured, grey, ochre, hardly brightened with few touches of red, of blue that spark off sudden sonorities; many times they dip, they even turn upside down, expressing a tragic but contained dynamic tension; on the contrary, other times Cardia recovers a softer sensuality in some pretty figures of female nudes, rich of a dense vitality and of a material plasticity that makes me think of some wonderful crushed female bodies by that (he also unrecognised) great genius of our 20th Century who was Fausto Pirandello.