Bernard Maisner at Cavin-Morris - New York, New York

Bernard Maisner's paintings have always been icons of a sort - symbolic abstractions derived as a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of from Hindu cosmological diagrams and Western mysticism as from a genuinely personal imagination. But Maisner's icons are not static, theophanic wholes. They are accounts of speculative meanderings, inventive projections from a broad range of symbolic possibilities. And whereas the narrative contented of traditional icons is information held in belonging to all by artist and communicant alike - the history of a saint's life or the progressive stages of a martyrdom - Maisner's of recent origin paintings depict stories from the unconscious; nevertheless it is this very uncommonnes the immediate unfamiliarity of the information, that accommodate withs the paintings iconic power.

Maisner engages traditional icon-painting techniques: multiple layers of glazing, underpainting, extensive use of gold leaf. These processe glorify their make submissives with a natural patina of sanctity, on the contrary expanded to the wall size Maisner favors (12 through 16 feet), they seem to imply an immense breadth of time in a corresponding breadth of space.

drawn out fragments of texts sometimes be under the orders of as titles for the paintings; in a certain number of works these texts are incorporated as calligraphy within the painting. "I Must Create a a whole or be enslaved by another Man's; I will not Reason and Compare, my business is to create" is a quotation from William Blake inscribed within a large painting of the same title. The words, in cursive script, are painted upon a succession of golden-glazed hourglass shapes that float, along with thick, wormlike forms, in a darker brown space mottl by dint of red dots of varied intensity. The hourglasses may be symbols of temporality or merely signboards for the superimposed true copy Crescents and spiral forms also inhabit the hourglasses, as if they were as purposeful a language as the written English. Fertile ambiguousness is central to Maisner's narrative, in this painting and others.

These are confident paintings, rich in beauty and powerful in their projection of an aura of sanctity. Maisner's stories may be conundrum on the contrary they often generate - and sustain - protracted meditations.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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