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The best-known artists on view, at least to American eyes, are Chia and Cucchi, both of whom are hotly pursued by collectors here and abroad. One can see why Chia, 36, has a following. It is hard either to dislike his work (it is too educated and, often, too funny for that) or be really moved by it (for the same reasons). It is ideal decor for the early '80s, revivalism tempered by well-placed clues of irony. It is chic, like a Fendi fur with metaphysical yearnings. Chia can run up a good-looking, hyperactive surface—all those squiggles out of Cy Twombly and the flecks of color applied in an ornamental parody of futurist "divisionism" are cute as kittens. And his parodical reach is so broad as to disarm hostility.
But a major painter? Of course not; he is a salon wit. Cliche piles on cliche:
Chia's bulgy operatic figures pose like Michelangelos and flourish their tiny daggers at frantic women. He will take a tourist postcard view of the Grotta Azzurra in Capri, render it big, add a floating Chagall girl upside down, add a few written phrases in the manner of '20s Mird, and title the whole pasticcio thus: In Strange and Gloomy Waters If a White Dot Shines If a Child Jumps I Will Approach Her Flight, 1979. Chia's visions may not be very deep, but nobody could accuse him of having a defective swizzle stick.
With Cucchi, 31, the problem is reversed. His paintings—of drowning swimmers and divers (like A Fish on the Back of the Adriatic Sea , 1980), heroes tormented by doppelgangers and harsh schematic landscapes—are elaborately ill-painted in order to support the fiction of terminal earnestness. This, of course, is the main trick in the repertory of neo-expressionist effects, and Cucchi does it over and over again. The best of his paintings here, The Mad Painter, 1981-82, seems to parody this condition; the rest simply deploy their accepted rhetoric of crudity as vitality. Artists of Cucchi's persuasion, wild pets for the super-cultivated, serve many useful ends. One is the recycling of old 1950s adjectives. "Primeval," "raw," "overpowering," "harsh"—here they are again, ready to go, led by "mythic." What could be more ingratiating than what is "uningra-tiating," these days? —By Robert Hughes