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Lot Essay
The Pharmacist's Son is one of a series of paintings made by Sandro Chia in the late 1970s and early 1980s that depict a lone and central heroic figure wandering through a magical land of fantastical colour and myriad detail. Metaphorical self-portraits, most of these figures represent the romantic fairy-tale image of the artist/hero engaged on a quest or pilgrimage in a strange and fantasy-filled world. Chia uses such imagery as an allegory for his own practice as an artist - a practice which he views as an endless and mystical voyage of discovery.
Invoking something of the spirit and meaning of alchemy with its imagery of a mercurial sprite-like figure fleeing through an explosive and fiery sky that has emerged above a case of bottles and flasks while being pursued by the pharmacist's son wielding a knife, the painting asserts itself as powerful illustration of an essentially unknown narrative. The Pharmacist's son of the title appears to have witnessed or perhaps, like the story of the sorcerer's apprentice before him, unwittingly created the mercurial figure seen fleeing at great speed across the sky. Following in pursuit, he is, perhaps unknowingly, also embarking on an ancient mystical journey, for the philosophical pursuit of such symbolic and magical figures as Mercurius whom the Alchemists attempted to confine in the bottle, was often, like the so-called 'fine' art of painting, a life-long obsession and enterprise.
In 1981 after years of working in a conceptual manner under the influence of arte povera, Chia had only relatively recently turned to the art of painting, finding himself now in his studio 'as if in the stomach of a whale.' His paintings, he said, appeared 'in this place like the undigested residues of a former repast and I recall the phrase with which Goethe opens his introduction to the magazine Propylüaen: 'The youth who begins to feel the attraction of nature and art believes that a serious effort alone will enable him to penetrate their inner sanctuary: but the man discovers after lengthy wanderings up and down that he is still in the forecourt.' (Chia cited in Sandro Chia exh. cat., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1983, unpaged).
Invoking something of the spirit and meaning of alchemy with its imagery of a mercurial sprite-like figure fleeing through an explosive and fiery sky that has emerged above a case of bottles and flasks while being pursued by the pharmacist's son wielding a knife, the painting asserts itself as powerful illustration of an essentially unknown narrative. The Pharmacist's son of the title appears to have witnessed or perhaps, like the story of the sorcerer's apprentice before him, unwittingly created the mercurial figure seen fleeing at great speed across the sky. Following in pursuit, he is, perhaps unknowingly, also embarking on an ancient mystical journey, for the philosophical pursuit of such symbolic and magical figures as Mercurius whom the Alchemists attempted to confine in the bottle, was often, like the so-called 'fine' art of painting, a life-long obsession and enterprise.
In 1981 after years of working in a conceptual manner under the influence of arte povera, Chia had only relatively recently turned to the art of painting, finding himself now in his studio 'as if in the stomach of a whale.' His paintings, he said, appeared 'in this place like the undigested residues of a former repast and I recall the phrase with which Goethe opens his introduction to the magazine Propylüaen: 'The youth who begins to feel the attraction of nature and art believes that a serious effort alone will enable him to penetrate their inner sanctuary: but the man discovers after lengthy wanderings up and down that he is still in the forecourt.' (Chia cited in Sandro Chia exh. cat., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1983, unpaged).