TWO CAREFUL TECHNICIANS WHOSE FEELINGS SEEP OUT

Explosive brushwork has long been seen as the hallmark of art concerned with emotional catharsis. By contrast, art that is tight and controlled is identified with a rational aesthetic. Two retrospective exhibitions at the Municipal Art Gallery to March 2 prove that it ain’t necessarily so.

Painters Karl Benjamin and D.J. Hall are very careful artists who probably spend more time thinking about solving technical and pictorial problems than about their precious feelings. As a result, the emotional vectors of their work hiss out as an intense seepage that can be the more interesting for being oblique. Aside from that, they have almost nothing in common. He is a veteran maker of hard-edge abstraction, she a respected practitioner in the problematic genre of Photorealism. Both have long since established the parameters of their art, and the good news of this exhibition is that each continues to get better.

Hall fixed herself in the viewing mind as a kind of West Coast Ivan Albright, casting models as American bourgeoise types at leisure, lolling in pools or resorts, grinning for the camera while they melted into sagging heaps of cellulite, varicose veins and discolored gums. Hall viewed the spectacle with horrified fascination, like a kid sitting in the tub watching her skin wrinkle up.

Early results like the 1978 “Hawaiian Gothic” had an edge of populist satire reminiscent of Duane Hanson’s sculpture, but mainly they were pictures of Dorian Gray. They belonged to the ancient and honorable tradition of the memento mori , updated to embody the airhead mentality of gorgeous California sun bunnies aghast at the realization that one day they would get a (yech) wrinkle.

Quick, Henry, the Oil of Olay.

The pictures were not bad, just irritating in their underlying narcissism. Meanwhile, however, Hall, now 35, has narrowed her sights, deepened her vision and broadened her feelings. It is a mild shock to realize that men have long since disappeared from her world. It is now populated exclusively by attractive women, showing the effects of a certain age but hanging in there bravely. A picture called “Kissing Her Fears Goodbye” memorializes a decision to mock at decay.

Purple, puckered thighs have by no means disappeared, but somehow Hall’s revulsion has turned to compassion and the paintings betray an overwhelming empathy that makes them quite special. She can portray a woman as silly, shallow and vain and still pry up that surface to reveal a rich inner sensitivity. There are flowers in the backgrounds of several pictures that seem to be talking about the poignancy of the cycle of life, blossoming brilliantly, bearing seed and fading.

There is no question that these pictures are about women now, coping with dilemmas both universal and historical. Work cuts right down the middle of the feminist issue without being in the least nasty or polemical. You get the feeling that Joan Didion and Germaine Greer would like it.

Pairs of friends have an afternoon drink at the beach or celebrate a birthday tete-a-tete, and there is a tingling sensuality about reflections in sunglasses or the dappled shadow cast across a face from a straw hat. A quality of passionate sentimental friendship emerges the way it does in the film “Entre Nous.”

In reality, many of Hall’s models are writers, business people or artists, but they are cast as stereotypical advantaged married ladies who shop and have lunch. It is a credit to Hall’s objectivity that they can be seen as humans with the sense to enjoy life, bundles of talent and energy going to waste in comfortable inequality, or cheerful vampires living on the plasma of alimony.

Hall has come not to give a damn about any of it. She is concerned about laughing and dancing on the beach, knowing full well your partner is death.

These pictures are among the few around actually dealing, Manet-like, with a novelesque social issue. One of the reasons they work so well is that Hall accepts the visual conventions dictated by the Polaroid snapshot. All photographs eventually become sad souvenirs of ephemeral time, and Hall picks up their emotional wavelengths.

The down side of this tactic is that composition suffers. Constantly plagued by awkward problems like that created by a clinker of a beach umbrella in “Good and Plenty,” these paintings are held together by their surfaces rather than their structure. (Like a lot of Photorealism they are more like up-tight Expressionism than classicism.)

What Hall gains in believability she pays for with the absence of a fully tragic dimension in the work. Well, all she has to do is summon up compositions as casual and heroic as “The Bar at the Folies Bergere.”

Artists complain, justifiably, that the public always likes their last show better than their present one. Well, for a change it seems that Karl Benjamin’s most recent work represents a peak moment among several series on view. Benjamin, 60, has a long record as a patient experimenter with optical structure. The results come across as seasoned and mature, especially in their resonant color combinations. But they are not without a touch of the sober delight of an intelligent boy who never tires of recombining colored blocks into kaleidoscopic snowflakes.

It takes, however, a lot more than doggedness to achieve the breakthrough of Benjamin’s best series. The kind of hard-edge abstraction Benjamin has practiced for years comes with a generic limitation--its patterned, symmetrical structure has about as much flexibility as wallpaper. We are not speaking here of some yahoo who says, “Hey I got some checkerboard wallpaper in my kitchen that’s as good as that and it only cost a dollar ninety-eight.”

We speak of formal limitation that says this kind of patterning can do surface blips like a light-bulb billboard, occasional transparencies and fictive optical massing like finding a big triangle in all the little triangles before it disappears back into the pattern and that’s about that.

This group of works begins in 1978 and it looks like Benjamin decided to break his overall pattern down and analyze the component parts. First came massed vertical stripes a la Gene Davis. The point of these bars of close-valued hue is to make them fuse visually. It always seems like a lot of work to get an atmospheric effect that can be had by blending, but if you are into hard edges you gotta do it the hard way.

Then comes some object-analysis using what looks like a pyramid reflected in a lake generated by a computer, some flat intersection exercises, drills in octagons that flop into illusionistic solids and then back to pattern with a set of tricky latticework interlacings. Art of Benjamin’s stripe is more interesting in the looking than the telling and this is all good work, but it seemed to purposefully set itself austere limits.

At first, Benjamin’s 1985 series (titled only with year and number like the rest) looks like a return to a particularly baroque wallpaper in a stylistic blend of Islamic tile and Jazz Age fabric. It looks so Post-Mod contemporary it causes a dawning flush of suspicion that Benjamin has gone Punk.

Then the fun begins. These complex, chunky interlacings of triangles and semi-circles begin to move and separate. One circle becomes a center of interest even though it is the same size as the rest. (I think it has something to do with placement.) Parts of the composition fall back into depth while loops leap like dolphins diving. The things are an absolute hoot, moving with rhythmic syncopation in completely unexpected ways. Whoops, the damn thing just tunneled into deep space.

After 20 years it looked like hard-edge was a mined-out, academic dodo, and Benjamin turned around and got it to do stuff it’s never done before.

I hope he’s pleased with himself.