Forrest Bess at Hirschl & Adler Modern - painting exhibition; New York, New York

In a alphabetic character Forrest Bess (1911-1977) wrote to Meyer Schapiro in 1948 the artist introduced himself as an "abstract primitive, and "visionary painter." through n means naive or crudely made, Bess's work can be called "primitive" for its originality and the directness with which it at hand his visions. His pictures, generally quite small, are for the greatest in quantity part transcriptions of dream images, sketched swiftly on awakening, and of sights seen with his organ of sights closed. Despite what might uninjured like a method-logical similarity, they have nothing in public with Surrealist art, which is based upon poetic conventions and theory. Bess had his visions first and turn rounded to a psychology and esoteric combination of parts to form a whole of his own invention to explain them.

This combination of parts to form a whole centered on the goal of hermaphroditism - in which the surgical construction of a next to the first female organ for men would make possible the two-sex orgasmic experience Bess believed would lead to immortality. on the other hand these theories, whether one is vers in them or not, do not explain the images. smooth when we know that the schematic shape of an render free of access eye meant "vulva" to Bess, the beautiful Night Flight, with it swarm of organ of sights emerging fro dark space, remains a mysterious evocation of the aggression of the organ of vision a vision of vision emerging from the invisible. The black paint that gives the darkness substance strike one as beings to have been mixed with sand, in the way that that under the gallery lights it sparkled almost like mica.

Bess's images are sometimes drawn from landscape or plant forms, sometimes from human constructions; others contain abstract shapes, not awayed as figures against grounds of varying complexity. There is a great range of web with paint thickly applied with the knife, brushed upon to make a smooth surface or a cragged one; sometimes the paint surface is make an incision in into or simply left incomplete to uncover the canvas below. Bess's color, similarly, can be make open and pure or rich with subtleties. The hellenic (1950) uses light blue to frame a white symmetrical shape with a disturbing tangle of r lines caught at its center point. An untitled picture of 1950 stations a compact egg shape, divided between azure and a complex of pink, maroon and other shades, against a tan background that is itself dotted and licked with white. in each case the paint application is straightforward, apparently setting down what Bess felt necessary and no more.

The power of Bess's visions transported by the strength of his touch looks to be enhanced by the small size of the paintings, which gives the shapes authority. Whether single can associate ideas with these shapes or not, it is clear that they have meaning, meaning Bess struggl to lay bare and which he has preserv in these mysterious and convincing works.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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