Most successful artists make work that, at least in part, springs from or reacts against art history. They've been educated at art schools; their work engages in a rich, ever-evolving dialectic around visual representation. "At the Center . . . In the Eye," a striking, fresh exhibit at the Nielsen Gallery, offers something different: three artists, two untrained, who seemingly had no interest in the art world around them.
Martín Ramírez, Porfirio DiDonna, and Forrest Bess were guided by their own lights. Each had his own iconography, manifested with feverish intensity in his work. The repetition and exploration of these forms jumps out at the viewer, thrumming with passion, blessedly free of theoretical cant.
Ramírez was an outsider artist, a diagnosed schizophrenic who spent the latter half of his life in mental hospitals. He died in 1963. (An exhibition of his late works closed last weekend at the American Folk Art Museum in New York.)
In the hospital, he didn't communicate much, but he drew, and stashed under his bed, pictures filled with vaulting patterns that recall the architecture of a Gothic cathedral or the ribbing of a wooden boat. These vibrate almost musically across the page, surrounding central images. In "Untitled (Man Riding Donkey)," it's a cartoonish caballero. In "Untitled (Train)," it's a train chugging out of a distant tunnel. Ramírez played with space, foreshortening, and intricate patterns to build dramatic, perplexing, and elemental scenes.
Bess briefly studied architecture before dropping out of school. He became a shrimp fisherman in Texas. Studying Carl Jung, he developed his own theory of the unconscious - that spiritual perfection had its roots in androgyny. He even underwent surgery in an attempt to become more hermaphroditic and prove his hypothesis. His paintings came from visions he had in the night, which he transcribed directly to canvas. He developed his own symbology; for instance, a cross that most of us would associate with Christ, he saw as a hermaphrodite.
You don't need to understand his lexicon to be moved by his work, which is forceful, dynamic, and enigmatic, mostly driven by abstract shapes, although there is a still life here, and a landscape of oil derricks. An untitled work from 1967 (he died in 1977) shows two circles seeming to protrude from a milk-drop-like corona against a gray blue ground. It's a birth, an implosion, or an emanation - who knows? It's powerful.
DiDonna went to Pratt Institute and then Columbia, and his rhythmic dot paintings in the 1970s were influenced by Minimalism. In the 1980s, he found himself painting the same form over and over, a central vessel with undulating edges, surrounded and filled with luminous tones and humming brushwork.
He called himself a religious painter, and as with Ramírez and Bess, his art contains something elemental, even sacred. In "Untitled, PDN 1," painted in 1985, the year before he died at 44 of a brain tumor, that central form is brilliantly brassy, bracketed by violet, brown, and other waving strands of color. There's something almost sonorous about the play of tones and lines - like the sound of a struck bell.
Highlights include Annabel Daou's "Memory Hole: reality," in which she writes the word "reality" in a series of twisting trajectories, creating a whipsaw pattern around the titular hole, capturing the tension between memory and reality. Laura Paulini's "From the center of a square #2" was made by dabbing dots on paper with a chopstick, resulting in shimmering, moth-eaten rainbow quadrants. Mathias Schmied starts with a page from Playboy showing a nude, then he cuts the page in ribbons down to the outline of the model's body, and it makes an eyelash-type canopy that protectively drapes her.
There are a dozen artists in "microwave, seven," and most make work that will make you squint and marvel.
Ellen Driscoll has put together "Near Everywhere," an exhibit at GASP that examines how small acts of everyday living can have far-flung consequences. It's got some first-rate work in it, in particular Adriane Colburn's expansive wall-hanging "For the Deep," made from reconfigured digital maps of the Arctic Ocean's floor, which looks like bright, twisted lace on the wall.
Marguerite Kahrl's "Noble Savage" is a soft-sculpture rendering of a witness to war from Goya's indictment of humanity's flaws, "Los Caprichos." It stands like a sentry near the gallery door. It was woven from hemp by neighbors of the artist in Italy. Jane D. Marsching's elegiac video "All My Vows" twines a Hebrew prayer with lines from the Kyoto Protocol as a weather balloon takes to the sky and a singing cantor climbs a tree. The exhibit feels anchored in the familiar, and like that weather balloon, it takes flight in directions unanticipated.
