Painting: Man in a Box

"I am confronted, more and more, by the strange, complex and fascinating riddle of ambiguity. No one is what he seems to be," says Californian Jan Stüssy. "I am obsessed by parables, riddles, codes, analogies, symbols, signs, and ideas which begin: What if ... ?"

Obviously, Jan Stüssy, 46, is a man in a box. But happily for him, he is also a painter who has found in art "the only compass I can use to find my way." Along the route, he has managed to have 27 one-man shows, with paintings in dozens of U.S. and European galleries. He is professor of art at U.C.L.A., where 31 of his latest works are on display before going on a tour of South America later this year.

Not unexpectedly, Stüssy for years has portrayed animals and men caught in a box, naked muscular forms that are sometimes bowed in resignation or despair, sometimes tensely flexed against their prison. In one series of paintings, the same rectangular form becomes the basis for a crouching, partially dissected Man Posing as an Animal, or a twisted animal in Resting Beast, or agonized Homo sapiens in Self-Wrestling. Following a visit last year to Chile, with which U.C.L.A. has a reciprocal art exchange program, Stüssy began painting women, a fact his sculptress wife, Kim, partly attributes to the shapely Chilean women Stüssy saw everywhere standing solemnly with folded arms.

Enigmatic Goddesses. "Beauty for me has something to do with ambiguity," says Stüssy. The women in his paintings have both. Unlike his men, Stüssy's women are not restrained, but have a disturbing, enigmatic mien, remote and goddess-like. In part, their arresting effect comes from his daring use of materials. Guilty Eve of the Garden is a collage built round the photograph of a Vogue model's face; Virgin: A Consolation uses almost nothing but the backs of old canvases; Female Mosaic uses plastic-lace doilies as stencils. Even more surprising are such conceptions as She and Me, in which Stüssy's bearded face is superimposed on a nude figure, with Stüssy's glasses substituting for breasts.

As a next step, Stüssy intends putting his men in a psychedelic box; he suspects it will drive them crazy. On other fronts he is experimenting with stretch cloth, photography and, most recently, has developed a movie technique for projecting multiple images. "Art seems to be a matter of searching," he says. "Very slowly I am trying to untie the puzzle."