"Lithographs Are Artist's Language"
Karen Mathieson

What is an artist's native tongue? Italo Scanga's lithographs and monoprints speak of the quality of light in Italy, where he was born in 1932. They also tell of life in America, where he has lived since his teens, as well as the cultural and physical landscape or New Mexico, where Scanga spent last summer on a fellowship at the Tamarind Lithographic Institute.

Based at the University of California in San Diego, Scanga works principally as a sculptor in many mediums. The pictures now at Seattle's Philip Brock Gallery, like Scanga's personal origins, lead to thoughts of how many languages a single artist may use.

Perhaps most noticeably, Scanga's vocabulary of images includes the poplar tree he has known since childhood. The beautiful columnar form inspires rapid, vertical brushstrokes in the over-painting of several lithographs. Though only shadowy elements in some pictures, they are nearly always present.

Other recurring figures are a vase in various forms, clusters of fruit, human skulls and rolling hills. Are these the hills of Italy, of Southern California or of the Southwest? They might be all three, felt as folds of earth against the sky.

The skulls (used in stamplike fashion, as if they were an Asian artist's signature) have multiple reference points as well. The New Mexican folk culture, in which children nibble on white candy skulls, springs from the Catholic traditions of Southern Europe that Scanga knew in his own youth. It was then that the terrors of World War II brought home the reality of death to a certain small boy assisting the furniture maker of a Calabrian village.

Scanga's response to the carved saints of new Mexican churches combines with his ongoing memorial to an Italian religious treasure, the cathedral of Monte Cassino. Founded in the sixth century and rebuilt after successive attacks by the Lombards, Saracens and Normans, Monte Cassino and the town around it were leveled by bombing in 1944.

In the two largest lithographs at the Brock Gallery, completed before Scanga's fellowship, he presents shards of destruction as well as cleanly incised frames for images similar to the mosaic-like structures of stained glass. Here, and in later works, the artist's vision cracks and reforms anew.

Scanga is an artist with the virility of his native soil, the freedom of expression prevalent in his adopted country, and the power to pull together different languages into one.