Italian art moves on from Madonna

Sometimes you need to step back to move forward and Italian art, if we are to believe curator Alessandro Riva, has recently done this. The result is a brand new school of art called "Italian Factory" and its impact can be judged at an exhibition currently being held at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM).

Riva is one of a contemporary breed of curators, arguably as important as the artists he represents. The critic and journalist said he coined the term Italian Factory in 2003 to describe a less intellectual and more classical approach to the production of art in his home country.

He said the name works like a trademark, or a company logo because it supports the creation of events — such as The New Italian Art Scene show at TFAM — and advertising campaigns around the world. There have already been Italian Factory exhibitions in Italy, Madrid, Tokyo, Shanghai and elsewhere.

"Italian Factory is not so much a group as a feeling. Actually the movement existed before the name and as a critic I have followed the development of these artists up to this point," Riva said last weekend at the exhibition opening, which comprises 47 works from 10 painters and sculptors.

"They are the generation after the baby boomers and are concerned with the renewal of traditional languages. They are very interested in the technical aspects of production. They are a new pop generation but are not like [US artist Jeff] Koons, as they have a different way of seeing."

According to Riva, his stable of artists have "taken from the media, comics and other sources but have returned to the material." They are also recognizably Italian in terms of the content of their works and their return to Renaissance, 17th- and 20th-century forms of painting and sculpting.

As an example, he pointed to Livio Scarpella and his polychrome terracotta figurines such as the Baby series: Baby Killer holds a handgun, surrounded by knives, mobile phones and a pair of handcuffs; Baby Gay's testicles rest on a pink cushion and he is caught guiltily applying makeup; Baby China is Asian-looking and appears to be unhappy with his toys, models of Mao Zedong (毛澤東) and Mary, mother of Jesus Christ.

"They seem to be traditional terracotta models," Riva said. "They look as if they were made by an artisan but the content is borrowed from pop culture and therefore the works are a new twist on an old idea. This is typical of Italian Factory."

Moving on to Giulio Durini, Riva said the artist's works, mainly oil on canvas, hark back to Renaissance portraiture in terms of coloration and concentration on the nude figure. However, all Durini's paintings feature males who are overtly homosexual and modern in their attitudes. They pose like fashion models.

Giovanni, for example, sits spread-eagled on a chair, languidly staring at the viewer. His genitalia are the focus of the picture and due to foreshortening are nearly as big as his face. This makes the painting particularly modern in its nod to pornography and homoeroticism, according to Riva.

Aron Demetz's life-sized figures made of lime wood are given an aluminum skin, so they appear to be part man, part machine (as in the movie I, Robot). Some have red paint smeared over them, representing blood or a return to the earth, according to the artist.

"They look almost perfect don't they? But the red color suggests they are still human and the idea of my statue Purification is that he has feet of clay," Demetz said.