A Dual Perspective on Nature Blossoms With Nuance

Making beautiful photographs of beautiful flowers may not sound like much of an achievement, but Cy Twombly has loaded so much subtlety into his seemingly simple pictures of tulips that you can’t take your eyes off them. Framed by six images of ancient Roman sculptures and five shots of treetops, the expatriate American painter’s 18 close-ups of bouquets form the centerpiece of a sumptuous exhibition at Gagosian Gallery.

Fiery orange reds, rich golden yellows, sexy hot pinks and other blazing colors are bracketed by cool lunar blues, delicately faded greens and soft, shadowy blacks. To scan Twombly’s finely tuned sequence of 29 prints is to watch a slow-motion movie, which begins with a chaotic abstraction (an extreme close-up of Dionysus’ swirling hair), moves through vivid still-life studies and ends by turning your eyes toward the heavens. There, the pale Italian sky is glimpsed through abstract patterns of silhouetted tree branches.

In the same way Twombly’s series has one foot on each side of the fine line that divides abstraction from representation, all his photos individually shift between these often opposed categories. From a distance, each appears fairly crisp, depicting solid substances and palpable presences. As you approach any print, however, the tulips, statues or trees seem to dissolve into intangible puffs of color drifting precariously in the air.

Like Impressionist paintings, Twombly’s works require that you stand back to see them clearly. Although they suggest that a distant, somewhat detached viewpoint provides the best perspective for viewing art, the images’ mysterious surfaces simultaneously draw you in for a more intimate view, where your surroundings fade away as you get lost in sensuous details.

Caught in this exquisite tug of war between restrained contemplation and hedonistic abandon, you find yourself at the center of the drama articulated by Twombly’s pictures: both an insignificant speck beneath the sky’s vastness and a powerful being transfixed by a little flower’s unbelievable beauty.

* Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9400, through June 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays.