Refrains of the ‘Day’

F. Scott Hess describes his stunning cycle of paintings on view at the Orange County Museum of Art as “prayers for atheists.” They are religious paintings, he says, “bereft of God but searching for the core of what it means to be human.”

Each of the 24 paintings could spin a novel of great complexity, so dense are they with implication, compelling detail, dangling discontinuities and dynamics between characters that beg a narrative framework. Together, the paintings form a cycle called “The Hours of the Day.”

Though the grouping doesn’t diminish the independent piquancy of each image, it does have an effect on their collective reading. It reinforces the allegorical nature of the project and intensifies the experience of the work in real, all-encompassing time. As in theater and film, time here is compressed and yet persuasive, ripe for full emotional immersion.

The paintings, made between 1994 and 2000, are titled individually but also labeled with an hour of the day and installed here in sequence. The day begins with the indelible image of a woman giving birth to a child, alone on a desolate riverbank (“Flood Plain” [5 a.m.]). A flashlight propped on one of her sandals stands in for the rising sun, its golden light spreading over her strong body as she eases the baby from between her legs.

The morning hours progress through a variety of images of labor and creation. An architect stands in his Vermeer-inspired, light-soaked office, positioning tiny figures on a scale model. Workers on a construction site are choreographed to look like a harmonious community of barn-raisers.

Reading, rest and other forms of leisure occupy the middle hours of the day and intensify toward evening, when meals become elaborate feasts of oysters and champagne and relations turn lascivious and surreptitious. With night comes darkness of all kinds: a man chained to a wheel in a hellish chamber, a winged angel lashing a young man’s back, a small girl watching her house go down in flames. Creation and destruction bookend the day. The sequence hints as well of the progression, soul by soul, from innocence to shame, from a sense of promise to one of dismay and despair.

Hess paints with extraordinary vividness in oil and egg tempera, orchestrating his compositions so that we, as viewers, are thrust into the action. He pushes figures and props to the immediate foreground, often letting the edge of the canvas cut them off so that the situation appears to have been seized, midstream, with the candor of a snapshot. The images convince us of their physical viability, then trouble us with the psychic consequences. Mysteries of human motivation curl through them, elusive as smoke, as the boundaries of propriety and convention are repeatedly transgressed.

In “The Open Window” (8 p.m.), a woman in her bath is sandwiched between the voyeuristic gazes of two boys behind her and of us viewers in front. She matches our stare with her own, unsettlingly direct. In another work, men changing after a swim look questioningly at a boy in their midst, unabashedly urinating on the locker room stairs. The boy, like several other figures in this series, including the birthing woman and a man wandering on a rooftop in the early-morning hours, directs his gaze upward, toward the godless sky, for answers.

Unfolding, partially, in neighboring paintings are stories of kidnapping, escape, rescue, seduction and myriad other situations that defy easy description. “The Sleeping Scholar” (2 p.m.), for instance, joins a middle-aged man napping in a park, using a stack of art books as a pillow, with a young man who seems to have just set a toy sailboat aflame and another who’s abandoned his bicycle to watch the boat burn. The scene is set in prototypical Southern California suburbia--Hess lives in Echo Park--red-tile-roofed houses ringing the distant hillside and suggesting a level of comfort and uniformity offset by the odd doings in the park, whose young trees are encircled by barbed wire.

The show’s particularly elegant catalog, with commentaries by the artist on each painting in the series, affirms how steeped Hess is in myth, biblical lore and art history. The kidnapping scene at 7 p.m. updates the tale of Iphigenia’s sacrifice; in “The Contract” (7 a.m.), a young man on a dock discovers an infant floating, Moses-like, among lotus plants.

A Style of Realism That’s Deeply Coded

Hess sets these tales in the present and costumes his characters in familiar, contemporary dress, yet the timelessness of allegory prevails, just as it does in the satirical prints of Goya and the moral extravaganzas of Bosch. Close contemporary neighbors might be Laura Lasworth and Ruprecht von Kaufmann, who’ve both shown in Los Angeles.

Throughout Hess’ work, the physical seductions of life mask an underlying tenuousness and instability. His style of realism is as accessible as the world around us and as deeply coded. As his fascinating catalog entries reveal, the paintings are driven by diaristic musings, studded with art historical quotations, invested with biblical import. It’s a blend so rich and engrossing that his “Hours of the Day” seep, memorably and readily, into ours.

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“F. Scott Hess: The Hours of the Day,” Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach, (949) 759-1122, through Jan. 6. Closed Mondays.