Diversity of Scanga on Display

Italo Scanga makes a terrific, confounding range of work. He paints ceramic plates in a light, buoyant style, full of charm and color. He assembles sculptures out of leather belts, metal machinery fragments and scavenged wood, sculptures with tough, confrontational personalities. Scanga, who teaches at UC San Diego, is also a painter and printmaker of formal images with architectonic elegance. And, with a lyrical touch, he illustrates poems on sheets of old liturgical music.

Though Scanga dips deeply into a variety of genres--all of which are on view in two current shows--his modus operandi remains fairly consistent: he gathers, digests, recycles and transforms materials or styles whose lives are already somewhat spent. At his best, he breathes life into tired discards, imbuing them with new formal, if not intellectual purpose.

The span of Scanga’s enterprise can be surveyed well in two La Jolla exhibitions. At the Atheneum Music and Arts Library, “The Art and Music of Italo Scanga” features a selection of recent, hand-painted ceramics as well as a series of small, encased paintings made on old magazine covers. The Porter Randall Gallery is showing a selection of Scanga sculptures from the early 1980s to the present, a small group of works on paper, as well as drawings and paintings by two Cuban artists.

Both shows have their moments of enlightened probity, and both also have their share of works of only an arbitrary, random sort of interest, the sort that Scanga’s odds and ends had in the first place.

Scanga’s painted ceramics, at the Athenaeum, update a long Italian tradition of decorated, functional earthenware. Created on a recent sojourn in Italy, where Scanga worked briefly in a ceramic factory, these round, oval and rectangular plates bear vaguely Cubist designs, like much of the artist’s painted wood sculptures. Shapes of warm caramel color, an ethereal pale blue, streaked teal and midnight blue are all outlined in black and tightly montaged in syncopated rhythms.

Scanga’s debt to Cubism shows in his visual splintering of the painted surface, but these abstracted areas are often complemented by figurative imagery of trees or mountains. In one set of plates based on the four seasons, Scanga painted straightforward landscapes with all the simplicity and charm of a faux-naif .

The names of Scanga’s favorite artists and composers appear among the patterns on many of these plates, turning the works into somewhat clumsy fan letters. Imagery on the plates varies slightly to reflect the artist honored: the Picasso plate features a vase-like form dissolved into Cubist planes, Mozart’s has a more ordered elegance, Copland’s a confetti of color. The unattributed plates are the most vibrant, with their looping lines, splattered and saturated colors paying homage to the delicious magic of art rather than the talents of specific men.

Scanga’s paintings at the Athenaeum, made on old covers of the “Magazine of Antiques,” convey a bit more formal tension than the ceramics. Patterns and bits of imagery from the covers peek through the artist’s painted marks, as if asserting a traditional foundation for the overlying abstractions. Unfortunately, many of these paintings, mounted inside boxes, rest on shelves far above eye level, making the interplay of the two layers of imagery difficult to discern.

Neither the ceramics nor the boxed paintings have the disarming, edgy quality of Scanga’s sculptures at the Porter Randall Gallery. There, Scanga mines the rich terrain of global angst and spiritual hunger.

While the ceramics and magazine cover paintings relate in scale to the human hand that would hold them, the sculptural works are made in proportion to the entire body. Many stand, upright and still, like mechanical men made of handles and gears, shovels and pipes. Several of these sharp, fleshless creatures proffer clear conical vases of fresh flowers, as if striving for the beautiful from the crude, the spiritual from the mundanely physical.

This disjunction between the graceful glass vessels and the tough, clunky forms that brace them gives a certain depth to Scanga’s work. Without this contrast between the plodding and the lyrical, the sculptures are pure substance and no spirit. In the Porter Randall Gallery selection, which ranges from a sculpture of a majestic painted-wood woman holding a hoop to another with a long, stiff strand of chain link emerging from a charred tree stump, Scanga consistently offsets the bleak with the poetic. The resulting undercurrent of optimism helps humanize Scanga’s enterprise and, occasionally, even lift it to the alchemical heights to which he aspires.

The show at Porter Randall Gallery includes starkly moving pictographic drawings by Jose Bedia, which diagram a material and spiritual order with concise power, as well as the paintings of Arturo Cuenca.

* Athenaeum Music and Arts Library, 1008 Wall St., La Jolla, through July 18. Open Tuesday through Saturday 10 to 5:30.

* Porter Randall Gallery, 5624 La Jolla Blvd., through July 10. Open Tuesday through

Saturday 10 to 5.

ART NOTES

Nora Desloge, Curator of European Art at the San Diego Museum of Art since 1986, has left the museum to relocate to Virginia, where she lived previously. Desloge organized the museum’s 1988 exhibition of work by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and the 1989 show of paintings by Joaquin Sorolla. A search is currently underway for her replacement. . . .

Local artist and arts administrator Cindy Zimmerman has been appointed executive director of the Ventura Arts Council. Zimmerman leaves a position as contractual administrator for the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture. . . .

San Diego artists Raul Guerrero, Margaret Honda and Jean Lowe are represented in the upcoming show, “From the Studio: Recent Painting and Sculpture by 20 California Artists,” opening June 27 at the Oakland Museum.