Art: Obliquely Addressing Nature

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?