ART : Italo Scanga’s Works Offer Visions of Dreamlike Images

Euro-style is the buzzword these days in the fashion and design magazines. Copywriters are applying it to anything that looks sleek, glamorous and worldly, whether it’s a leather jacket or an end table.

“Euro-style” conjures up a continent of wealthy, impossibly sophisticated types who’ve seen it all and, frankly, are rather bored with it. You can imagine them murmuring veiled insults to each other in fashionably stark apartments while chain smoking and picking idly at cuisine minceur.

As it happens, much important contemporary European art tends to come across as more secretive, spare, unlovable and coldly theoretical than the American variety. But some sophisticated European artists are mining a different vein of experience--the peasant basis of modern-day culture. Artists such as Magdalena Abakanowicz and Mario Merz, well-versed in the ins and outs of contemporary art, are finding new ways to express such themes as closeness to the earth, religious ritual, and the burden of political oppression.

Italo Scanga, whose paintings and sculpture from the past few years are at the Art Institute of Southern California through Jan. 2, was born in Italy in 1932 and immigrated to the United States in 1947. Scanga has taught and exhibited widely in this country, and he has been on the faculty at UC San Diego for more than a decade, yet his work is still flavored with memories of his native region of Calabria--where popular belief in magic thrived for centuries alongside a devout Catholicism.

His wooden figures standing on low carts are descendants of the images used in church processions at festival time. His use of junk objects and vivid patterning, and his deliberate primitivizing of the figure also hark back to other times and places untouched by the hard-edged consumer values of America in the ‘80s.

At the same time, however, Scanga’s work reflects the curse of late 20th-Century artists: the awful weight of all the historically important styles that have come and gone during the past few centuries. He is a latter-day troubadour singing an optimistic song of man and his place in the world as well as a painfully self-aware artist whose vision is shaped by the ironies of contemporary urban life.

In his “Figure With Plow and Lion,” a small metal object is attached with wires to a tall stick figure with no feet or hands, and whose body is painted in a decorative pattern of bright colors. This stick person stands on a low table patterned with animal and human figures along with a real tea kettle and a crudely shaped spatter-painted head of a lion. The significance of the miniature plow and the lion are not entirely clear, but these items give the simple, home-made figure an aura of myth. Perhaps he is the brave spirit of the fields, or the emblem of farmers in a town whose civic symbol is the lion. (Traditionally, the lion is a symbol of St. Mark, one of the four Evangelists.)

A more polemical tone infuses “Troubled World (Awl),” in which a globe (labeled with the word hunger) is balanced on a large rod-shaped tool. The tool (too big to be an awl, unless there’s an industrial-size variety) rests in turn on an upended pitchfork with a splayed wooden handle that looks like a pair of miniature legs. This entire balancing act is perched on a tree trunk whose chopped-off limbs have been crudely covered with swipes of black paint.

The piece offers a set of symbols for farming, nature, man and the world at large, and it calls attention to the precariousness of humankind’s interconnectedness.

Scanga’s work seems less interesting when it gets more arty. In “Red Figure With Banjo,” he builds up the figure with an array of wooden pieces suggesting the way Cubist painters shattered the figure into volleys of arcs and straight lines. He echoes generations of modernist art-scavengers by recycling a fragment of wooden frame as the figure’s arms.

The musical theme harks back to a favorite Cubist subject, and the real banjo and guitar in the piece suggest the Cubists’ use of bits of real wallpaper or newspaper as foils for their painted abstractions. Even the vibrant patterning that covers both figure and instruments owes more to Abstract Expressionism and Fauvism than to peasant art. Ultimately, however, the piece seems rather cold and contrived, lacking the warmth and funky oddity of some of Scanga’s homelier sculptures.

His loosely brushed paintings are full of glancing references to nature--skies and mountains, birds and trees and gourds--and also colorful passages of dots or speckles. Human beings only rarely wander into this fairy tale paradise.

In “Untitled (Woman with Urn),” the peasant woman with a basket on her head is a collaged photograph of a painting from another era. In “Untitled (Mandolin and Vase with Figure)” the figure is a wispy white painted nude, as insubstantial as a ghost. Such images, with their lack of logical space or proportion, operate almost like dream memories. The main n problem in work of this kind is offering too much cute, folklorish imagery without delivering the emotional goods.

Although Scanga does not quite stoop to formula, his combinations of images sometimes suggest a dream told so many times that it no longer has its original magical power. One wonders whether he has not journeyed--geographically and psychically--so far from his original themes that they no longer seem immediate and compelling.

Next week: a look at Imre Bukta, a Hungarian artist (in “The New Art of Hungary” at the Modern Museum of Art, through Feb. 18) who paints his countryside with a brilliant mixture of irony and affection.

Work by Italo Scanga remains through Jan. 2 at the Art Institute of Southern California, 2222 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. Gallery hours are 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays, 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Fridays and 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturdays. Admission is free. Information: (714) 497-3309.