Maisner Goes His Own Way--Into the Past

Some art fulfills itself in curiously oblique ways, as witnessed by “Bernard Maisner: Entrance to the Scriptorium.” On view at Pepperdine University’s art museum, it presents a 25-year survey of a New York artist in his mid-40s. It’s subtitled “Illuminated Manuscripts and Paintings.”

Since the art of embellishing books with fanciful initials and miniaturized pictures guttered out centuries ago, curiosity is piqued even before seeing the work. One glance disabuses us of any anticipation that Maisner wants to literally revive a lost art. The work looks like a combination of modern abstract Surrealism and Outsider art, but the spirit of the Middle Ages is strongly felt.

As a student, Maisner was enraptured by a mid-15th century crucifixion by Rogier van der Weyden. Significantly, it wasn’t the figures that turned him on but a flat red drape and plain white wall in the background. From this surreal epiphany Maisner fashioned a sort of floating post-and-lintel motif he then carefully painted on everything from bricks to flower petals.

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Mastering such demanding techniques as calligraphy and gold leafing, the artist applied them to parchment and hand-made papers. Elaborated with colors that seem to glow from inside, every surface is worked down to the last centimeter. Normally regarded, they broadcast so many odd little effects that pretty soon you’re imitating the artist’s scrutinizing gaze. You notice, for instance, that the glowing edge of a mandorla is actually hundreds of needle-thin radiating lines. A jewel-like texture is really a hand-painted grid of sixteenth-inch squares. Occasional imperfections reassure us this wasn’t done by a computer.

Maisner’s compositions derive largely from the square and the circle. The former becomes everything from sturdy tile to bejeweled mini-mosaic. The orb transforms from eye to complex mandala. Nothing about this seems arbitrary. Clearly demonstrating that the greatest complexity is but a permutation of simplicity, he extends the metaphysical observation into the realm of modern science. The circle symbol becomes an organic blob, atomic, cellular, spermatozoid.

Early works include a scrap of paper with musical notations inspired by John Cage. A conventional watercolor of a London church with heavy stone walls suggests the artist’s later use of trompe l’oeil tiles and stone. “Radiate” (1984) is fairly typical of mature work. Literally gridded like a window with wood mullions, each zone includes a symbolic motif. Ranging from a dark organic puddle through handprint and rudimentary house to end in a flaming eye, this may be a journey to enlightenment.

The work is universalized; their Christian Medievalism evokes the artist’s Judaic heritage in allusions to the stony background of the Western Wall, then alludes to the Hindic in a folk-art footprint. Calligraphic quotations woven into these motifs allude to the metaphysical, but many sources are modern and almost none from conventionally religious writers--Kafka, Anais Nin and William Blake are here, among others. The latter’s words seem to act as Maisner’s motto--”I Must Create a System or Be Enslaved by Another Man’s.”

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Each painting seems finished but none resolved. This open-ended quality creates a sense of their holding a conversation with one another but not necessarily with the viewer. We are privy to a certain kind of ritual without being part of it, rather like visiting somebody else’s temple.

Without preaching, Maisner’s art imparts a conviction that in matters of the spirit, simple belief isn’t enough. What’s required is his sort of self-absorbed devotion. It carries him through most of the 95 works with a kind of intense calm until we encounter the small “Hallway.” Depicting a schematized arched passage with tile floor, its leitmotif is a lunar metal orb that seems to ooze blood. It’s the only image so far that signals strong emotional disturbance.

That malaise is echoed in a room of recent large paintings, the first of his career. “Heraclitus, ‘All Things From Eternity’ ” is a fugue of bleeding brown circles. Other paintings do theme-and-variation on two centrally placed stacked zeros. They read simultaneously as figure eights, signs for infinity and hourglasses. Compared to earlier work these Abstract Expressionist-scale canvases hint at an artist regaining aplomb after a difficult rite of passage.

The traveling exhibition was organized by the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art, St. Louis University. Curated there by Terrence E. Dempsey, local presentation was supervised by Pepperdine’s art museum director Michael Zakian. A 66-page catalog with an essay by Dore Ashton is forthcoming.

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* “Bernard Maisner: Entrance to the Scriptorium,” Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, 24255 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu. Through Dec. 17. (310) 456-4851.