Seeing the light in a maverick's new work

RIDGEFIELD, Conn. -- Playing hard to get with the gallery and museum system is not recommended for most artists, but it works for some. David Hammons and Cady Noland are two Garboesque artists whose legends have grown in inverse proportion to their limited public exposure. Neil Jenney , who has a small gem of a show at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, is another.

Jenney sells his magically luminous landscapes out of his own studio. Although he has been included in the Whitney Biennial, the Venice Biennale, and many other important group exhibitions, he has not had a solo show of new works in a commercial gallery in almost 20 years. His last in an American museum was a small display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1994. So the Aldrich exhibition is a rare and welcome opportunity to study recent works by this fascinating, richly idiosyncratic artist.

Born in Torrington, Conn., in 1945, Jenney attended the Massachusetts College of Art from 1964 to '66. After starting out as an abstract sculptor, he turned to painting. At the end of the '70s he became widely known when paintings he made in 1969-70 were included in two history-changing 1978 exhibitions: "New Image Painting" at the Whitney and "Bad Painting" at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. Those shows opened the floodgates to all kinds of bold, new approaches to representational painting, and Jenney was revealed as a pioneer leading the way out of the desultory impasse at which abstract painting had arrived.

Jenney's early paintings, made in a style that seemed both sloppy and exacting, resembled large fingerpainted works by an inspired self-taught naif . They revolved around odd dualities, which were identified by words painted in block letters on their frames. "Saw and Sawed" depicted a cut-up log and the tool that did the cutting; "Them and Us" illustrated a pair of fighter planes, one Russian and one American.

By the time of the "Bad Painting" and "New Image" exhibitions, Jenney had already set off in a surprising new direction. Under the influence of 19th - century American Luminists like John Frederick Kensett and Martin Johnson Heade , he began to create landscapes with smooth, glowing skies, fluffy, curiously blocky clouds, and trees, rocks, and other topographical elements painted in hyper-realistic detail. These new works, which he displayed in massive black frames of his own construction, he called his "Good Paintings" to distinguish them from his early "Bad Paintings."

The Aldrich exhibition features eight "Good" paintings that Jenney completed since 2004 (his works can take as long as five years to finish). These new works project a haunting, elegiac beauty.

In the two largest, both called "North America Divided," the wide, deep frames enclose narrow, horizontal vistas measuring about 8 inches by 8 feet. As though seeing through the slotted window of a military bunker, we behold sections of tree trunks whose textures are rendered with a sensuous painterly touch against heavenly skies that seem as though lit from within. In one, part of a rusty barbed-wire fence extends a cross the lower edge, giving the text printed in a 19th - century style font on the frame -- "N Divided A" -- an allegorical edge.

The phrase "North America Divided" is susceptible to multiple readings: one thinks of the Civil War; of the boundaries between the United States and Mexico and Canada; of the rift between nature and industry; and of a division in the collective American psyche between interests of spirit and of capital. If all this sounds portentous and preachy, it's not. The oversize frames add a wry theatricality that undercuts any tendency to bombast, and the imagery has an exhilarating, even trippy vividness.

The six other paintings in the show, all considerably smaller, have a delicate intimacy that compels close examination of their realistic details and fine brushwork. Two 8-by-10 paintings depicting rural scenes could be mistaken at first glance for the works of a Northern Renaissance miniaturist. One describes a rustic wall of large rounded stones whereon lengths of wood lean toward each other like neighbors discussing the weather. The other shows a dirt path leading through an opening in a wire fence past a rusty, dented garbage can and an old stone gate post.

Another pair shows views of unblemished sky: one fading from pale yellow to dark blue called "Morning," the other, fading from peach to deep purple called "Evening." And a trio of paintings, each called "North American Aquatica," presents close-up views of water realized with brushstrokes so lively that the paintings verge on abstraction: Autumn leaves float on a limpid stream through which you can see the shadows they cast on the stones below; frothy whitecaps fleck a dark, opaque surface; concentric ripples radiate from something that fell beyond the picture's edge.

In these works, Jenney is not thinking only about nature. He's thinking, too, about the tools we have available for describing the world. If there is sadness in his work, it might be for the cultural loss not only of nature but of a language equal to the particularity of empirical experience.

Interspersed among the paintings are examples from a set of silkscreened conceptual works on canvas and paper dated 2000. In each, white letters on a black rectangle spell out an aphoristic statement such as "Idealism is unavoidable" and "Art is nature adjusted." It's interesting that Jenney has such thoughts, but his landscapes have a much deeper and more expansive eloquence.

A selection of drawings dating from the '70s to the '90s is on view in a separate gallery. Among them are studies for a painting of a seated Statue of Liberty to be called "Liberty Contemplating the Nuclear Age"; a loving, sketchy portrait of the art collector Herbert Vogel; and drawings of baseball players wearing sleeveless uniforms that Jenney, an avid baseball fan and a lefty pitcher in an over-38 league, conceived for the New York Mets. The Mets didn't go for them, but what do they know about art?

Ken Johnson can be reached at kejohnson@globe.com.