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Image of Metaphysical (Guitar)

Italo Scanga

American
(1932–2001)

Metaphysical (Guitar)
1986

Wood
94 x 18 x 18 in. (238.76 x 45.72 x 45.72 cm)
Gift of the Marie Eccles Caine Foundation and the Kathryn C. Wanlass Foundation
2008.19

Although Italo Scanga’s artwork is closely associated with the themes and iconography of his native southern Italy, it also shows the revealing and persistent influence of the abstract language of early modernism. In Metaphysical he takes a group of traditional columnar forms and reconfigures them with the cubist assemblage techniques of Picasso and Braque, while echoing the cinematic forms of Boccioni and the geometries of Brancusi.

Metaphysical is composed of three shafts, each nearly eight feet tall. These are made mostly of wood elements, both found objects and raw material shaped in his Southern California studio. A violin fragment perches in a nest of sawn wood pieces; an upended guitar clamps a figurative element against a scalloped plank. Beyond their formal nod to abstraction, such musical elements recall imagery from the early twentieth-century modernism of Paris and Turin.

Similar works by Scanga are painted in bright colors, but here the disparate elements are unified by his use of unpainted and lightly stained wood. Individual details, while energetically interlocked in a larger architectonic form, are recognizable as real things that also carry symbolic references. The inclusion of drafting triangles and protractors alludes to the characteristic geometries of modernist abstraction, as does the linear drawing on some of the flat planes. The title implies that Scanga consciously thought about this piece in terms of the work of Giorgio de Chirico, whose surreal paintings linking the classical world and early modernism are emphatically echoed here.

Despite such a referential (and reverential) use of history, Scanga creates something wholly his own—figurative, totemic, and ultimately monumental in its presence.

Ronald J. Onorato

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