ITALO SCANGA (1932- 2001)

Italo Scanga, west coast artist, came to America from Italy in 1947, at age 15, with his family. He has taught art at the University of California, San Diego, since 1978, and has been a frequent artist-in-residence and teacher at Pilchuck, the art-glass school in Stanwood, Washington.

What is an artist's native tongue? Italo Scanga's lithographs 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 of New Mexico, where Scanga spent a summer in 1989 on a fellowship at the Tamarind Lithographic Institute.

Italo Scanga works as an artist in many mediums. Like Scanga's personal origins, his works lead to thoughts of how many languages a single artist may use.

One doesn't ordinarily think of lithographs as "talking," but that's an appropriate notion for the exuberant graphics of Italo Scanga. His conversational gambits run from sly ambiguities and provoking silences to histrionic pleas delivered tete a tete. Scavenging the history of art, watered by an excitable temperament that ricochets from the literal to the metaphysical, Scanga's art works go to extremes to engage the viewer in pointed dialogs on a range of subjects. What ultimately matters is less the substance than Scanga's vitality, much like an encounter with an extraordinary character on a park bench.

Internationally, Scanga is a highly respected figure whose works can be found in dozens of major museums from New York to Vienna. His works are a remarkable romp of subjects, delivered with uniform enthusiasm; as stimulating as they are idiosyncratic.

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