ART REVIEW : Italian Works Feed the Mind and the Eye : Art: ‘Eternal Metaphors’ exhibit at Cal State Long Beach shows works by nine deft artists that are at once ingenuous and sophisticated.

To see the world with a child’s delight and a pundit’s wit--that seems to be the impossible dream of a diversified group of Italian artists in their 30s and 40s. Happily, “Eternal Metaphors: New Art from Italy,” at the University Art Museum, Cal State Long Beach, shows these nine painters and sculptors to be unusually successful at fashioning bright new garments with the old rags of cultural history.

Unlike some of their American peers who self-consciously plunder the past for attitudes and styles, the deft Italians feed the eye as well as the mind. Having grown up with the sackcloth-and-ashes approach of arte povera-- the ‘60s movement that emphasized humble materials--the new generation switches to a more overtly sensual approach. Although some work figuratively and others do not, all seem blissfully oblivious to the legacy of the famous triumvirate of Italian neo-Expressionists of the ‘70s and ‘80s, Clemente, Chia and Cucchi.

Most of the new art is drenched in symbolic and metaphorical references to Catholicism, mythology, pagan ritual, art history, and metaphysics, yet it not only offers visions of hope--it offers them in a spirit that is at once ingenuous and sophisticated.

“Genetliaco (Day of Birth)” is a sculptural tableau by Fiorella Rizzo in which axes cleave brutally into sculpted wooden heads with blurred features. Covered with red earth and mounted on columns, the serenely anonymous heads could be artifacts from a primitive agricultural society or monuments to the early church martyrs. Perhaps they also represent the enduring nobility of the human race despite centuries of earthly violence.

Remo Salvadori’s “La Stanza della Tazze (The Room of the Cups)” is a little room built to the artist’s dimensions that holds eight shaped paintings: waxy black abstracted hemispheres tipped with vividly colored ovals. The privacy of the room, the luster of the colors and the tipsy alignments of the cups, clustered and tilted like errant planets, suggest they are dual emblems of the sacred (Communion) and profane (social drinking). The room itself is reminiscent of the fanciful painted chambers created by the owners of Roman and Renaissance villas.

Bruno Ceccobelli’s mixed-media works begin life as useful objects (boats, tables, big wooden boxes) and are transformed with paint and found objects. Intensely plotted according to a system of religious numerology, these pieces also offer the delicious immediate pleasure of richly tactile, “primitive” designs. Whether or not one reads the tree in the central panel of “Pianta altera (Proud Plant)” as symbolic of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, the image itself--made of spirals of wire and brown paper “leaves”--radiates hope and life.

In Mimmo Paladino’s “Non avra titolo (It Will Not Have a Title),” large gold-painted geometrical symbols--only a few of which have any recognizable meaning--fill an entire wall. On the floor, the angular torso of a bronze mannequin--an Apollo? an ancient warrior?--extends long arms in a quietly beseeching gesture while its mouth plays two flutes at once. Small holes on its head once might have fastened a crown. At once noble and helpless, cold and erotic, silent and musical, the figure might be an emissary from the mysterious wall of mute and gilded signs.

Gianni Dessi’s “Pala salata (Salted Altar)” is another massive mixed-media work with objects directly referring to the Passion--chalice, hammer, pincers--and rows of devotional candles bolted down in tight rows. The waxy, muffled, hastily assembled and abandoned effect of this arrangement gives it a strength and honesty. But references to the artist (as a martyr? a witness?) seem hackneyed, and arranging empty tubes of paint into crosses on easels is simply overkill.

Alfredo Pirri’s three gravely simple circular paintings--”Il rumore (The Noise),” “Senza titolo (untitled)” and “Respire (I Breathe)”--all seem to be images of the Earth. Uniformly black in the first piece, broken by nervous white lines in the second, and shrunken and lightened in the third, the globe recovers from (ecological?) disaster.

Ettore Spalletti’s three untitled paintings on wood are luminous swaths of soft matte pink, turquoise and blue. The color wraps around the edges, allowing the paintings to read as objects--as if the glorious and expensive hues used by medieval painters had blossomed into independent spheres of beauty.

Nino Longobardi juxtaposes a huge face sketched in red chalk, a fleeting glimpse of the man’s body and a pair of cone-shaped, projecting horns in “Ritratto di un poeta (Portrait of a Poet).” Although the link with Michelangelo’s powerful image of a horned Moses seems forced (the cones seem so light and whimsical), the way the lineaments of the face keep disappearing into swirls of gray paint suggests the impossibility of visualizing even the most forceful personality except in fragmentary “takes.”

Luigi Ontani’s gay recasting of the Virgin and Child and some auxiliary folk in an untitled set of watercolor tondos is a mildly naughty confection painted in a brightly curlicued, linear style with a bow to Etruscan murals and Italian popular art. Ontani twists traditional representations of the subject to his own ends: The infant Christ makes devil’s horns with one hand; the other one grabs an unbelievably long and rigid finger of his Mother’s.

The exhibit, curated by Susan Sollins of Independent Curators Inc., New York, remains on view through March 25.