Art: Obliquely Addressing Nature

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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.