ART REVIEW : BENGSTON EXHIBIT PUTS SIZZLE IN A COOL NIGHT

Billy Al Bengston has scarcely entered his 50s, but his place in the history of painting is already substantial and secure. He began making his mark 30 years ago, and he continues to be a formidable presence.

To the rest of the United States--and the world--his work quintessentially represents hedonistic California art--colorful, complex, seductive. It is an art to live with in a happy physical relationship rather than an art to be mystified or worried by.

Bengston’s passion for hot color and compositional exuberance would seem to bespeak Latin rather than mid-American roots. Sojourns in Mexico and Hawaii have contributed substantially to the imagery, color and flavor of his oeuvre. Bengston may be peerless among artists of his generation for the square yards of beautiful painting he has created.

He has been phenomenally prolific, perhaps too much so. A major exhibition at the James Corcoran Gallery in Los Angeles earlier this year was disappointing. In several of the large works exhibited there was a flaccidity of execution as well as of inspiration.

San Diegans are fortunate, however, to have an opportunity, an annual event now in its fifth year, to see a choice selection of new works not exhibited before-- acrylic paintings on canvas and watercolors on paper--at the Thomas Babeor Gallery in La Jolla through Oct. 5. Babeor has created a successful gallery in a difficult environment through the judicious exhibition of “blue chip” artists. His current Bengston show is exemplary of that predilection. It is a splendid gallery show, one that stimulates acquisitive desire.

Bengston has long made iconic use of certain images. For many years it was an army sergeant’s stripes, hence a series known as “the chevron paintings.”

Later he used a stylized iris, which resembled Bela Lugosi as a vampire with arching arms lifing an open cape, hence the series known as the “Dracula” paintings. The iris not only resembled the sinister representative of the “living dead,” it also looked like a combined male/female genital form. The artist used the iris repeatedly, almost compulsively, over a period of years in paintings, watercolors, prints and on folding screens. It was a kind of signature, perhaps even a self-portrait.

Bengston’s new works are equally, if not more explicitly, erotic--albeit still symbolically. Their titles are romantic names of exotic places like “Borneo,” “Tunis” and “Manila,” or simply innocuous like “May Watercolor” or “July Watercolor.” For those who have eyes to see (or the inclination), there are simple phallic forms in the cropped monochromatic airplane fuselages that frequently cross a sky or, again, a combined male/female genital form in the images of anthuriums, a flower so improbable that it looks artificial with its singular brilliant red petal and long yellow stamen.

The works in the exhibition fall into three groups distinguished by compositional devices that illusionistically separate inside from outside: grids (often only partial) suggesting window frames; narrow bands suggesting shutters, and undulating diagonal passages across the top corners of canvases suggesting curtains. Anthuriums splayed across the grids and cropped by the edges of the picture planes advance lasciviously into the viewer’s space, while in the background glow tropical skies.

“Antibes,” arguably the finest painting in the exhibition, presents voluptuous red, pink and orange anthuriums with stylized, straight contours against a grid of matte green horizontal and black diagonal bars. A dusk sky of glazed blue whorls flickers ambiguously, advancing to the foreground. The partial image of a gray airplane crosses the bottom.

Throughout the works in the exhibition there is a masterful interplay of geometric and organic forms, of hot and cool colors. There is romanticism with images of the moon and purple islands in the distance. Airplanes suggest escape to something but they may also suggest flight from something. In their resemblance to sharks, they may even be predatory.

For blatant sexuality, there’s “May Watercolor” (immediately to the left inside the door) with a big, pink, fleshy anthurium and an orange airplane. Wow!