Feeling the life force in his work

Growing up gay in a heterosexual world can be good for the imagination. In the already tangled sphere of day-to-day social relations, almost everything that happens must be translated, transmuted and transformed, to function in even the most modestly appropriate way. The process is relentless and exhausting, but also potentially rich in idiosyncratic delight.

“On Wanting to Grow Horns: The Little Theater of Tom Knechtel,” which opened last week at the Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design, builds a stunning proscenium arch around that phantasmagoric drama. Organized by Otis gallery director Anne Ayres and midway through a four-city tour, the show includes more than 90 paintings and drawings made since 1976. As essayist Ron Platt puts it in the show’s catalog, the work’s elaborate “visual mythology” is simultaneously alien and familiar.

Knechtel’s paintings and drawings are indeed rich and idiosyncratic--as well as relentless and exhausting, when seen in the abundance of a mid-career retrospective. The artist packs his work with such voluminous incident and lush detailsthat the simple act of looking consumes considerable energy. Imagine the jewel-like marvels of an Indian miniature multiplied a hundredfold, or the cosmologies of Hieronymous Bosch refracted through a prism.

Knechtel’s web-like mazes are complex when the panel is a disk 18 inches in diameter. When it’s composed on a series of linked wood-and-canvas panels 7 feet wide, the eye and mind reel.

Rarely is there a glimpse of terra firma on which to rest in Knechtel’s acutely rendered universe of animals, masked clowns, grotesques, self-portraits, furniture ensembles and all the rest. Air and water are more common, and fluidity implies transience and temporal change.

Take “The Flood” (1993-94). A vortex of color sweeps up everything in its path, from tiny shoes to cathedral domes, while pajama-clad men on horseback ride the swirling wave as cuckold’s horns sprout from their heads. Nothing is at rest. Everything is a spur to another image or activity, linked by a rhyming shape or the repetition of a theme or color pattern.

These visual connections among otherwise seemingly unrelated elements function in two ways. One is narrative, the other spiritual.

Knechtel’s paintings have the quality of epic tales, but they don’t tell linear stories. “Map” (1998-99) is composed of two small vertical panels, stacked on top of each other, one painted in fiery yellows, reds and oranges, the other in cool blues, greens and grays. The division between light and dark could chart day and night, heaven and hell, good and evil, or other such familiar binaries. Mostly, though, the shower of fantastically decorated images that tumble through the pictorial space like an elaborate tale by Scheherazade, in which the marvelousness of the fiction outstrips any moral.

Indeed, in a large, saffron-colored canvas from 1997, Knechtel pointedly portrays himself as “A Middle-Aged Scheherazade.” A Buddha-like figure is shown as part puzzled self-portrait, part whimsical Falstaff--”not only witty in myself,” as Shakespeare had Prince Hal’s drinking buddy declare in “Henry IV,” “but the cause that wit is in other men.” The multi-armed figure wears a huge ruffled skirt stuffed with circus paraphernalia, animals and other exotica, which makes him the personification of a big tent. Meanwhile the pool of water in which he stands affords him the look of a stupendous fountain.

The spiritual dimension of Knechtel’s paintings is located in this fecund sense of abundantly flowing life, where nothing is excluded because everything can somehow be linked to everything else. The sacred has little to do with ideas of purity, and the profane is not exempted from enthusiastic embrace. The spirit is rich and diverse.

Knechtel graduated from CalArts in 1976, when the prospect for spiritual concerns in art was not exactly optimal. Nor, for that matter, was the prospect for painting. But Knechtel’s doggedness in the pursuit speaks of a conviction: If the sense of social openness in the art world of the period was authentic, then why couldn’t spiritual issues and painterly ones be addressed? There’s a Victorian quality to Knechtel’s art (think of hallucinatory eccentrics such as Richard Dadd), but it seems born of a refusal of repression (now think of the elegant fantasies of Jean Cocteau).

Knechtel is also known for exquisite works on paper, and the survey is marked by an abundance of exceptional drawings in silver point, gouache, ink, crayon and pastel. Some are working drawings for paintings, but most are independent works of art. If the paintings are notable for their elaborate density, the works on paper are distinctive for their spare precision.

Not that they’re any less magical or imaginative. (When was the last time you were presented with an anatomically convincing rendition of a baby griffin?) The sense of a fluid life force that courses through Knechtel’s intricate, labor-intensive paintings is encapsulated in the drawings, where a monkey’s face or a sleeping cow is rendered in splendid isolation.

Knechtel’s most powerful work uses the blank space of the paper as a critical compositional element of the drawing. Sometimes it becomes the glowing light that seems to illuminate the drawn figure from within. Elsewhere a colored sheet provides dynamic contrast for the choice of pastel. Occasionally, in a device adapted from Chinese and Japanese brush paintings, a few fluid marks of ink on paper create a pictorial calligraphy, occupying a distinctive realm somewhere between writing and imagery. In any case, object and space depend on one another.

Most of Knechtel’s drawings seem straightforward, but the more you look, the more complex and strange they become. A delicately rendered monkey’s paw is tied with a pink ribbon, while the rearing head of a horse is rendered Venetian-style, in red chalk on green paper. Applied adornment is a human urge, which takes on uncanny powers when encountered in the wild.

One of the largest and most remarkable drawings in the show mines related decorative territory. A mustachioed muscleman, shown from the waist up with arms crossed and looking like a 19th century bare-knuckle boxer, wears an elaborate, four-layer ruff around his neck. He’s somewhere between a Van Dyck aristocrat and an abject modern circus clown. But the determined glower on his face, together with the formidable bulge of his bicep, suggests that one could mock his elegant sartorial embellishment only at one’s peril. He’s beauty and the beast, all rolled up in one -- and a luscious marker of Knechtel’s singular aesthetic.

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‘On Wanting to Grow Horns: The Little Theater of Tom Knechtel’

Where: Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design, 9045 Lincoln Blvd., Westchester

When: Tuesdays-Saturdays, 10 a.m-5 p.m.

Ends: Feb. 13

Price: Free

Contact: (310) 665-6905