Art: View from the Guts

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Sitting under a dark red painting of a huge human fetus in his living room in Ghent, Belgian Painter Octave Landuyt recalled a bit of his childhood. "I lived with my parents in a flat over a local slaughterhouse," he said. "I used to play among dying animals and heaps of entrails, while blood ran in the gutters. I saw bulls stagger under the deathblow, heave up again and again. It all had a primeval greatness."

Landuyt denies that these grisly memories influence his work, but the blood does run and there are heaps of entrails in the paintings that are on view this week at Manhattan's Albert Landry Galleries. Some of the paintings can make a queasy viewer turn green. But once the initial shock wears off, it becomes clear that the paintings have an impact beyond sensationalism: at 39, Landuyt is a painter of unusual power.

Landuyt sees all nature as made up of a limited number of "essential shapes," and these are the subject of his paintings. He favors the rounded, horizontal shapes, so that a man's head takes on the look, not of an egg, but of a mushroom. "This makes my figures as squat as in the pre-Columbian art that I love." But figures rarely appear in his work at the Landry: his paintings have become "essential surfaces" in which he tries "to penetrate the primeval aspect of matter." Shells, corals, bones, bulbs—all fascinate him. So do his microscopic studies of bits of skin, strands of hair, pieces of crystal. Transposed to canvas, these forms turn into other forms, so that the interior of an ear can just as well be the inside of a flower.

A great coral "essential surface," painted in meticulous detail, becomes a bouquet of blood vessels. In another canvas, bits of torn flesh seem to be raining down like autumn leaves from one hell above to another hell beneath. A series of black-and-white paintings are as intricate as the veins of the eye or the sinews of the arm. Always there is the sense of seeing nature from within, of literally being sucked into the guts of things. Landuyt's great achievement is the suspense he manages to generate, as if each of his oozing, pulsating interiors were about to pop. This is the magic he is after—to catch the seed just as it is about to burst into life, "the supreme moment of utter standstill and containment before the eruption of form."