Obliquely Addressing Nature

By ROBERT HUGHES

Among the few respectable things in that stew of American vanguard kitsch, the 1985 Whitney Biennial, was a large painting by a 36-year-old artist named Terry Winters. Done in a thick, ocherous impasto, which produced a paint surface that looked both lavish and summarily abbreviated, the image suggested (of all unlikely things) mushrooms: swollen glands like morels, crinkled and cellular, standing up in ranks like an array of mysterious brown balloons. It was odd to find any painting in such a show that addressed itself--however obliquely or eccentrically--to nature. But its relation to nature did not look simple. The painting was no botanical illustration. It was full of pictorial feeling and seemed only part factual, with the studied ineloquence, the refusal to grab a viewer's lapels, that one gets in Jasper Johns or Cy Twombly. Its drawing was casual, but intelligently so. It used botany obscurely, for some ulterior end--but what? And did it look better than it was for being surrounded by trash? To test that, one had to wait for a full show. That exhibit is now on view, at SoHo's Sonnabend Gallery, through February. And it confirms the feeling that Winters, in a New York City art scene depleted and numbed by the hangover from the early '80s, is one of the truly serious artists of his generation.

His "subjects" are small, mute structures with no minds of their own--not animals or people but seedpods, spores, pollen, sprouts, twigs, pupae, the embryonic scribblings of cellular life learning to write its name. One painting, Insecta, 1985, is full of chrysalises, cockchafers and stag beetles, with a red cicada clinging to a scrubby patch of blue ground. Another, Pitch Lake, 1985, has an array of spore clusters creeping, with phallic intent, across a sticky-looking field of bitumen. Some of the images are quite recognizable (there are clams, for instance, and bean sprouts), while others have the sketchy look of genetic diagrams.

Winters, of course, is by no means the first 20th century artist to get interested in minor life-forms that need a microscope, or at least a magnifying glass, to reveal themselves. One thinks of the buds and pods that crop up in Paul Klee's watercolors, some of which are fanciful illuminations of Goethe's ideas about the Urpflanze, or "primal plant"; or of the extraordinary images of tiny natural structures taken in the 1920s by photographers like Karl Blossfeldt, in which a seedcase can rear up like a Gothic tower, suggesting all manner of analogies to architecture. But Winters' paintings evoke this quintessentially Romantic idea of the very small as metaphor of the very large without being very explicit about it. The paint surface is too rough for that: heavily worked over, it is long on touch but short on info. At the same time, its muddy strength has little of the impetuous fervor of recent neoexpressionist painting. It is crusty and rather stolid. So what is going on?

Winters thinks of the thick paint as "one of the tools and devices associated with expressionism"--but no more than that. He objects to being tagged as a neoexpressionist. "Whatever else it is about," he insists, "my work is not about the self. I want to get at something outside myself; one gets sick of looking at indulgent expressionist pictures that suck all the air out of the room." He prefers to think of his paintings as "diagrams that describe the way the world works," but one has to take this with a grain of salt. Actually, they come as much from minimal abstraction as from botany. The first time Winters painted a microscopic object was in 1980, when, seeking to relieve the monotony of a field of abstract color, he had painted in homage to Brice Marden, he decided to put in a diagram of the crystalline structure of the pigment, the form of the mineral out of which the surface was made; paint describing itself. He knew about pigment minerals because he ground his own colors. From then on he gradually put together an archive of crystals and plant forms, and it colonized his paintings.

The resulting images are like windows into a distinctly shaped but largely unrecognizable world. They have more than a little in common with surrealism; one thinks of the Pandora's box of little involuntary creatures, buzzing and defecating and copulating, that Joan Miro opened in the 1920s. And like those dreambugs, Winters' fungi and spores have a distinctly human air. In their aggregation, they refer to social structures: hives, crowds, nests, colonies. They suggest hierarchies and sometimes conflict. But all this is decidedly muffled, submerged so far in the paint that it hardly works as allegory. Winters does not want to make his images specific: "I want them to trigger multiple readings, so that they somehow function above and below language, not exactly on the line." But some of his titles, like Dystopia (the reverse of Utopia: a failed society), 1985, leave no doubt that rumination on the human order is meant.

Above all, Winters' paintings are not illustrations, either of things or states of mind. They are rather too indefinite and physically aggressive for that. The heavy paint erodes the form; it is the foe of exact morphology, and it works against clear, taxonomic definition. This builds a layer of frustration into the image: it seems perverse to take objects that are only, or mainly, of scientific interest and handle them in a way so calculated to frustrate scientific curiosity. The dandy's thumbprint lies lightly on this show, a sign that both Johns and Marcel Duchamp have been there before, one with his puzzling equivocations between things painted and things named, the other with his mock- scientific glosses. But this is no bad paternity for an artist to have, and the slightly skittish intelligence of Winters' paintings is bound to appeal to those sated (as who is not?) by routine parades of gut sincerity and pantomime anguish.