ART REVIEW : PITTMAN PROVES THE UGLY CAN OFFER FASCINATION

The paintings now at the Patty Aande Gallery (660 9th Ave.) epitomize everything that the public generally regards as ugly in contemporary art.

But Lari Pittman, who made them, is a brilliant artist. He has a fresh, idiosyncratic vision. His paintings rake the senses and the sensibilities. They test preconceptions.

They are confusing. There is nothing definite to focus on as a clue to what they mean. Your eyes scan each surface in response to a combined gentle compulsion and brutal repulsion. And when you are done looking, or cannot bear to look anymore, you are still questioning.

The biomorphic shapes are puzzlingly sinister. Often they resemble the creatures you might view through a microscope in a drop of scummy pond water. But there are other forms as well--cobwebs, a scorpion, vaginas, a horrible pink phallus, tree branches, a bird’s nest. Pittman’s forms grab your attention because they either are or seem to be recognizable. They are not pleasantly engaging. But they fascinate.

Pittman’s colors are also off-putting, their physical impurity conveying a feeling of general malaise. They look dirty--dirty lavender, dirty yellow, dirty orange, dirty white. And they are perversely mixed with materials regarded in our society as luxurious and elegant--mahogany and gold leaf, for example.

Pittman adds, as well, other materials to his surfaces--found objects such as a large ornately carved Chinese wall relief in “Birthmark” and large pieces of egregious 1950s wallpaper in “Maladies and Treatments.” He also heaps up great textured bogs of pigment whose oleaginousness recalls materials put away in toxic waste dumps.

Even the titles are ominous--”Host and Parasite” and “In Search of a Cure,” for example. There is, along with everything else, humor in Pittman’s works--the spider webs of haunted houses, even the face of a small ghost, the outrageousness of banal wallpaper, the contrast of the artist’s elegant script floating on writhing, mean-looking organic forms. The former California Institute of the Arts student seems to refer to the scariness created by the school’s founder, Walt Disney, in many of his films.

Pittman, as all significant artists must, tests the definition of what we at present accept as good painting. It can be pleasing forms and colors. But he proves that it does not have to be. He is such a master of composition and color that he can challenge traditional standards in every way and teach us something new.

Once you overcome an initial, conventional response to the nastiness of his colors, you can at least respect the way he uses them. Once you recover from the distaste of seeing his forms doing obscene things to one another, you admire the way they work in masterful compositions. Try, for example, to block out key components. The paintings do not work so effectively without them. Even then, as one informed visitor, an artist, observed, “If you think you have it, then he lets you know you don’t.”

Pittman’s paintings, with their antecedents in surrealism, open the subconscious, with all its horrors, but its glories, too. They are both ominous and seductive, paintings you can love and hate.

They are visually nourishing. You might not like the taste of them, but they are good for you.