The viewer is thrown into a philosophical quandary: Is the truth out there?

Although Mark Lombardi died at 48, a year and a half before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he made some drawings during the last six years of his life that speak with cool, eerily prophetic eloquence to the post-9/11 world.

On pages measuring up to 10 feet or more across, Lombardi drew schematic compositions resembling star charts or maps of submolecular phenomena. Sweeping solid, dotted, curved, and straight lines made in pencil connect small circular nodes neatly labeled with the names of people, groups, and institutions. Far from the transcendental harmonies these expansive, airy webs seem from a distance to represent, however, they document all kinds of nefarious, earthbound human activities, including the criminal enterprises of Al Capone, the S&L banking scandals of the 1980s, and the Iran-Contra affair.

One of Lombardi's most ambitious works, now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is ``Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, Reagan, Bush, Thatcher, and the Arming of Iraq, 1979-90." Completed in 1998, this 10-foot-wide composition is based, like all Lombardi's works in the series, on information gleaned from newspapers, books, and the Internet. An art historian and curator before he began concentrating late in life on making art, Lombardi was a tireless and resourceful researcher; only viewers already well-versed in recent Middle Eastern history will be able to make complete sense of the scores of people and organizations identified in the drawing and the movements of money and influence represented by the arcing, crisscrossing lines.

The back story is easier to follow. It concerns covert efforts by the governments of the United States and Great Britain to manage the war fought between Iraq and Iran from 1980 to 1988. It seems the United States and Britain supplied arms to both sides in the hope that the two countries would neutralize each other. Lombardi's drawing focuses particularly on America's use of the state-owned Italian bank BNL as a secret conduit for funds aimed at building up the military might of Iraq and its leader, Saddam Hussein.

Ever since the United States invaded Iraq in what seemed to many a puzzlingly indirect reaction to Al Qaeda's 9/11 terrorist attacks, questions about the Bush administration's real motivations have been a matter of debate and speculation. Was the purpose really to spread freedom and democracy, or were there other unacknowledged plans? Many people who knew Lombardi and his work have wished he were still around to connect the dots. But that misses the larger point of his art.

Part of the experience of Lombardi's drawing is a kind of narrative thrill, not unlike that of novels by Thomas Pynchon and John le Carre. Discovering the shadowy interconnectedness of what you would have thought were totally unrelated people and agencies can induce paranoia, but it is also curiously satisfying; the world starts to make a kind of cosmic sense. Lombardi's works are near-perfect weddings of aesthetic form and worldly content.

The drawings leave out a lot of information, and they raise as many questions as they answer. Their broad, untouched areas of white paper are metaphorical as well as literal: You have to fill in the blanks for yourself. So the viewer is thrown into a philosophical quandary: Is the truth out there, a discoverable empirical order? Or do we project the truth by means of our own stories and fantasies and according to our aesthetic predilections onto an otherwise chaotic reality?

After 9/11, that philosophical quandary took on a more than theoretical urgency. Lombardi did not predict the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or the US invasion of Iraq, though you get the feeling that had he lived he would not have been surprised by either. What he left for the future was an exemplary method for making sense of the bewildering and scary new world so tragically ushered in by the events of Sept. 11, 2001.

Ken Johnson is the Globe's new art critic. He can be reached at kejohnson@globe.com.