Painting: The 2-1/2 Dimension

Renaissance artists prided themselves on their mastery of perspective, which could make a flat-surfaced painting seem to recede into infinity; cubist painters warped the lines of sight to show several sides of the same object on a flat canvas. Today, younger artists are finding that they need even more room to explore their illusive imagery. The results are constructions (see color) that fall somewhere between two-dimensional painting and three-dimensional sculpture. The artists might best be described as working in 21 dimensions.

Space Reporters. For the U.S.'s John Willenbecher, 31, the extra half-dimension grows out of his enthusiasm for the space age. As a boy, he spent hours gazing through his telescope at the heavens; today his Manhattan studio is plastered with NASA moon photos and maps of outer space. His constructions are essentially intended as windows looking out of the world to a celestial view beyond. His Spheremusic #2, currently on display at New York's Whitney Museum, combines shining globes in concentric circles, like a baby planetarium. "The ball," he explains, "is the symbol of the infinite, of geometry, of an infinite continuum."

Belgium's Paul Van Hoeydonck, 41, is another artist who finds "Cape Kennedy the most romantic place on earth." His subject, too, is space. To depict it, he has abandoned pure painting in favor of white-on-white bas-reliefs made of discarded department-store mannequins, pingpong balls, electronic gadgets and gizmos. He paints them all pure white, he explains, "because white symbolizes infinity and mystery."

Van Hoeydonck's panoramas are meant to show the effluvia that will float past the porthole or radar screens of future capsules en route to distant galaxies. In Radar #V, he covers the view with a layer of colored Plexiglas partly because it creates a bloodcurdlingly realistic mood of objects adrift on an uncharted sea. Van Hoeydonck maintains that he is not trying to frighten people. "All I'm trying to do," he says, "is be a kind of reporter of the future."

"Light Means Death." The work of Mary Bauermeister, 32, is far more subtle and complex because her subject is not the wide blue yonder but subjective space—the difference between seeing and remembering, between appearances and reality. The daughter of a Cologne genetics and anthropology professor, she works today in the U.S., building extraordinary constructions that combine lines and squiggles, notes and letters, painted wood hemispheres and optical-glass lenses that jiggle and twist the viewer's eye as he walks by.