Italo Scanga at Ro Snell - Santa Barbara, California

Art in America, March, 1993 by Betty Klausner

Scanga aptly introduced his latest body of work, which makes strategic use of floral arrangements, in Santa Barbara, a year-round garden paradise. Each sculpture is made of found objects, mainly antiquated tools and architectural scraps, welded together to form tall vertical shapes. Each work features a conical glass vessel containing different kinds of fresh flowers, some in bunches, some alone. The vases, varying in height from 19 to 26 inches, sit in iron ring-shaped holders attached to the metal upright part of the sculpture. Many of the tools are painted in Scanga's signature expressionistic style. It was a buoyant experience to see these 12 witty, totemic sculptures - a vision of unexpected pleasure.

For the past 20 years, Italian-born Scanga (now based in San Diego) has occasionally incorporated glass forms into his mixed-medium work. But these are the first pieces in which he has used such gorgeously colored, hand-blown glass in such a utilitarian mode. His contemporary-styled vases - most in intense, scumbled reds, greens and blues, with contrasting lips - were made by a Murano craftsman at the Pilchuck Glass Center in Seattle, under Scanga's supervision. An important part of the concept behind the new series is the participatory nature of the pieces, which goes beyond their collaborative fabrication. The gallery (or owner of the work), not the artist, gets to do the floral arrangement - choosing the roses, delphiniums, gladioli or birds of paradise to finish off what Scanga started.

Inspired by museums and flea markets, Scanga unabashedly dips into both art history - a full range of 20th-century "-isms" - and leftover stuff from everyday life to make his work. He ferrets out such discarded objects as a scythe, a doorknob, a chain, a scale, a frying pan, a ladle and a wrought-iron cowboy riding a bucking bronco to construct his floor-standing and table-sized assemblages. Like the objects in George Herms's or Betye Saar's work, Scanga's recycled artifacts evoke memories and questions about the past. Recontextualized in works of art, our culture's junk provokes us to reassess our disposable environment.

The essence of Scanga's strategy is clearest in one of the more successful works, a 70-by-16-by-14-inch sculpture titled Ice Tong and a Wrench. Here the contrasts and counterbalances are at their most effective. The organic flower atop the man-made tools invites an allegorical reading - life and death, perhaps. The ice saw's sharp-toothed edge, aggressive and dangerous, is pointedly incongruous with the delicate calla lily. And, adding to the internal contradictions of this sculpture, the transparent glass vessel, fragile and reflective, is placed in implicit opposition to the rugged steel blade.

This show marked a major shift for Scanga, not only in his choice of materials (primarily metal instead of his customary wood), but also in his willingness to allow his work to be "completed" by the variable addition of short-lived flowers. Here he seems to have won his gamble, demonstrating that art can be accessible, potentially useful, participatory and beautiful - attributes not often valued in the postmodernist mainstream.