Lessons From Nature’s Rhythms : ‘Organic Abstractions’ Exhibit Is Dedicated to Helping Unravel Art’s Mysteries

Most of us have known people who would rather court failure by tackling a complex project than limit themselves to an easy task with few challenges. Happily, some of these people work at institutions that let them stretch their wings and risk a bumpy flight.

“Organic Abstractions,” at the Irvine Fine Arts Center (to Oct. 24), is an exhibit that shoots for the stars. Curator Dorrit Fitzgerald picked a theme that’s notoriously hard to explain in ordinary language and plunged right in, combining a glorious group of paintings by Marc Pally of Los Angeles with work by two other California artists. She wrote essays for the accompanying brochure, which also contains brief historical remarks and a time line by Kathleen A. McCormick, and even dreamed up lists of words visitors could roll around on their tongues (“meditative,” “cosmic space”) to try to describe the indescribable.

Although there are problems with this enterprise (we’ll get to those shortly), it represents a genuine dedication to presenting unusual work and to helping unravel the mysteries of art for people who simply do not see what all the fuss is about.

So what is organic abstraction, anyway? It’s not a specific movement in art, but rather abstract work that takes its cue from the rhythmic forms of nature--leaves and stems and roots and rocks. Imagery also comes from the facts and visual data about the universe that are revealed by astronomy, microbiology and physics.

The most fruitful era for this type of work was the 1940s, when Abstract Expressionist painters explored so-called “biomorphic” imagery--fluid shapes, loosely based on natural objects and sometimes wedded to fantastic mechanistic imagery grimly reminiscent of the horrors of World War II. In our era, organic abstraction has moved into new realms as diverse as Pattern Painting and conceptually based art.

On first encounter, a single painting by Pally may seem to be a mishmash of ideas for several different works. It looks as though each element has a different scale and frame of reference, independent of the others. That’s no accident. Pally’s work is based on an analysis of the different kinds of pictorial “language” available to the artist, and the simple fact is that there is no way to reconcile all of them in a tidy package.

So he feels free to doodle, paint, model, drip and even visibly scrub out marks he makes on the canvas in a range of media (including oil, graphite, charcoal, shellac and modeling paste). Forms can be tiny and compressed or large and sprawling; blindingly detailed passages bump up against loose washes of color.

The imagery is a great stew of formal types borrowed from such fields as biology (bone shapes), botany (knobby vegetative forms) and chemistry (webs of lines that resemble atomic models). There is also a seemingly endless number of other kinds of shapes swiped from everyday life (a chair, a windmill blade), memories of landscapes and even memories of the organic abstraction in other artists’ paintings.

Although Pally pays homage to the Abstract Expressionists’ gestural freedom, his paintings also record the awareness of an artist in the late 20th Century that it is no longer possible to believe in the thundering romantic credos of an earlier era of modern art. This cynical age no longer believes in a single towering truth. Instead, the mind is obliged to make its own terms with the bewildering array of ideas that come its way. This self-conscious awareness of pluralism that cannot be reduced to any one idea is the key to the teeming flux of imagery that Pally teases into such a strange and compelling whole.

The exhibit brochure reprints a key remark Pally made several years ago (“I read in the newspaper that science is zeroing in on the centrality of uncertainty as the organizing principal of reality. That’s what I always thought art was about.”)

But the brief text does not really discuss the reasons Pally paints the way he does. This is such difficult and important work that viewers really need all the help they can get.

Despite its evident sincerity and flashes of keen commentary, the brochure is written in a clumsy way with sentences that often don’t quite hang together. Complex ideas are compressed into very limited space, making the text hard to follow and sometimes factually misleading.

Another facet of the exhibit--lists of words posted in the gallery that supposedly relate to each artist’s work--is an experiment that needs to be developed more fully. Some of the words do not seem to be related to the art (how is Pally’s work “theatrical”?) and others (such as “psycho-sexual”) demand explanations of their own.

In any case, the lists seem to be putting the cart before the horse: Having an appropriate vocabulary at our fingertips may help the conversational flow, but first we have to have a clear, linear idea of what the works are about.

The exhibit also falters in matters of emphasis and tone. While Pally can rightly be said to be a trailblazing painter, the accompanying work by Stephen Rubin and Stephanie Weber is more limited in scope. Yet the catalogue essays show no awareness of this distinction.

We read, for example, that Rubin’s forms “become metaphors for the infiniteness of human behavior as it is formed and re-formed by events of the outer world.” That’s just empty blather, certainly not much help in seeing what his work actually has to offer.

In his brightly colored paintings, Rubin engineers combinations of curving shapes with firm contours. Tilting and twisting, these forms have a somewhat mechanistic quality, as though Rubin was trying to patent a new machine by adding such ingredients as cocked hats and hatching eggs to a superstructure of roots, bones and pipes.

In “Hive Horn,” a beehive-shaped form uncurls to become a horn, and an asymmetric cup shape turns upside down to drip out a strange blob that looks like cow udders. “Only Trust Your Heart” takes on the appearance of a desolate abstracted landscape, with roots and bones and hard ridges.

The strength of these works depends on the freshness of the forms Rubin dreams up and the way they work rhythmically in space. Vivid color can only be icing on the cake, and sometimes Rubin seems to depend too much on its powers.

Weber’s work has undergone several metamorphoses during the last decade, but the constants seem to be her interest in layering imagery to evoke the floating depths of some primordial sea--and a self-effacing, low-key quality that often seems more like a mumble than a whisper.

In an uneven group of recent pieces, a triptych from her “Nysia Series” holds up best. On the central panel, white will-o’-the-wisps dance through a brownish background, like motes of light on a brackish lake. One of the panels on either side, which are painted with vertical or horizontal strokes of a wide brush, vaguely suggests a wooden pier submerged under water. The rigor inherent in the three-part composition and the simple geometry of the stripes offers a solid base for Weber’s muted effects.

Also on view, in the rear gallery, is the first of a yearlong series of small shows called “New Juice in Orange County,” which replaces the former, larger-scale annual “New Juice” exhibit. Through Sept. 1, Miriam Smith is showing her black-and-white abstract pastels and a group of ceremonial objects from a trip she took up the Sepik River in Papua, New Guinea, in a dugout canoe--a trip that supposedly inspired her work.

Evidence of that is hard to fathom. The small pastels are unreadably murky. One of three pieces from her dark “Bush Walking Series” offers an elongated flash of whiteness, like a mirage created by a fluke of light and water. A horizontal untitled drawing looks vaguely like a primeval landscape. Still another looks rather like the inside of a planetarium before the show begins.

Essentially, these pieces look like dry runs that haven’t yet hit their stride.

“Organic Abstractions” continues through Oct. 24 at the Irvine Fine Arts Center. Also on view through Oct. 24 are abstract paintings by Marlon Dee Meyer and ethnic masks and folk art from the collection of Fullerton resident Mal Mealey. The current installment of “New Juice in Orange County” continues through Sept. 1. The center, at 14321 Yale Ave., is open from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Fridays, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturdays. Admission is free. Information: (714) 552-1018.