ART REVIEW : Winters’ Growth: Sensual Fusion of Culture, Nature

Terry Winters’ paintings of spores, fungi, blastulas, mollusks, seedpods, cell clusters and the like are sensuously diagrammatic. And what those juicy diagrams plot is more than simply a range of lower life forms and biological structures.

Painting itself is suggested in Winters’ art as a rich, dense and strangely mysterious practice, filled with life both vibrant and oddly insentient. The seemingly simple structure of painting--especially abstract painting--is shown to be remarkably complex. Yet, the arena is also posited as one in which highly articulated experience must share equal billing with the utterly inchoate.

The mid-career survey of Winters’ paintings and drawings that opened Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art lays out the course of his work since 1980 in a clear and rigorous way. Organized by curator Lisa Phillips for New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, where the show will be seen in February, the nearly 50 canvases and 50 works on paper have been given an almost stately installation in the industrial spaces of MOCA’s capacious Little Tokyo facility, the Temporary Contemporary. (The installation was designed by MOCA curator Kerry Brougher and the artist.)

Winters, 42, has been painting for 20 years, but it was only in the 1980s that he hit his stride. That decade’s international resurgence of painting--a resurgence catapulted into orbit by a volatile and explosive art market--has only now, in the quiet following the storm, begun to be sorted out. Just a few years ago, a mid-career survey such as this would have been clouded by an inescapably promotional air. Now, it offers an opportunity to take stock of Winters’ art, and of how his unusual forms got where they are today.

The survey at MOCA deals with a relatively short period of time. One work on paper dates from 1979, one painting was made this year. Its expansive examination of a single decade allows for close reading. Appropriately for the paintings’ often microscopic subject matter, it generates a feeling of burrowing into Winters’ art.

That early, 1979 work on paper is a small, egg tempera painting divided into a horizontally tripartite field of earthy, abraded color. This lone example is meant to tell you where Winters was, artistically, when his mature work began to develop.

One place he could be found was deep in the field of abstract art, especially the stripped-down abstraction of an artist such as Brice Marden. Marden’s waxy skins of subtly luminescent color, laid down in such a way as to quietly but inescapably emphasize the painting’s skeletal armature of stretcher bars and canvas, drew a metaphoric line between the structure of an abstract painting and the human body of a spectator standing before it.

A Marden-like division into three vertical panels of tactile color marks a selection of three of Winters’ casein paintings on paper, from a presumably larger group called the “Spine Series.” The central panel of each features truss-like drawing--the pictures’ titular “spine”--erected around the vertical division. Winters was nudging Marden’s metaphor of the abstract body into the territory of the diagram, which is a paradoxically figurative kind of pictorial abstraction.

Another place Winters was exploring was the realm of painting materials. Casein is a milk-based paint, an unusual, if not unheard-of, medium for contemporary artists; and egg tempera, in which mineral pigments are mixed with egg yolk, was largely usurped by oils on the artist’s palette half a millennium ago. Vaguely atavistic, paints made from milk and eggs are obviously loaded materials for art, vaunted arena for the nurturance of creative urges.

The most exciting feature of the show at MOCA is its first few rooms, in which these densely provocative strands begin to come together to weave a foundation for Winters’ art. Here, the pivotal work is a sequence of three large, vertical, mostly black-and-white canvases, from 1980-81, titled “Plane of Incidence I, II and III.”

One is a black field with white drawing, and one a white field with black drawing; the third is divided into black-and-white halves with drawing on each side in the opposite tone. Sometimes the drawing is made with paint applied by a brush, sometimes by dragging the stick end of the brush through the wet, painted surface.

The abstract diagram is thus both positive and negative. Painting’s options get reduced to a kind of plus-and-minus set, whose grandest terms could be said to be darkness and light, void and presence. Using this modern, binary system, every option has been methodically worked through and tested out. The result: three paintings, not two.

Winters had been grinding his own pigments to make the paint he used, and the mineral basis of those pigments was to become the rudimentary image on the abstract canvas. The space in each is subtly bisected. From the vertical remnant of the earlier drawings’ “spine” there grew the simple, diagrammatic shape of a crystal. On the black canvas the white crystal diagram climbs up to the left, on the white canvas a black crystal grows down to the right; on the black-and-white canvas they penetrate and are informed by one another.

“Plane of Incidence I, II and III” is a kind of orderly index of Winters’ fecund concerns. Despite often lush passages of paint and dazzling conceptual implications, however, this isn’t a suite of truly great paintings; it’s finally too didactic for that. But, important paintings aren’t always the ones that are fully realized. This group gains in significance for having established a fertile ground--an aesthetic mulch--in which his spores and blastulas soon would grow.

In fact, Winters’ sheer skill at paint-handling sometimes gets him into trouble. The pretty, balletic arrangements of spiny spores in paintings such as “Track” and “Double Gravity” (both 1984) are lush but facile. These decorative confections seem knocked off with vacant ease.

Far more compelling is the cataloguing of hacked-out images in such pictures as “Pavement” (1983), “Good Government” and “Ricochet” (both 1984), and “Dystopia” (1985). Deliriously sensual surfaces meet frankly ugly forms and compositions, which wrestle each other into a state of mutual regard.

The space of human relationships is of course at issue in paintings such as this. Typically, Winters attempts to wriggle down into a narrow and otherwise imperceptible space between seemingly contradictory terms, looking for a region where they might be joined and out of which something unexpected can be bodied forth. (That’s the “plane of incidence” diagrammed in those early paintings.) When he finds it, the painting takes off.

And, if there seems to be something potentially erotic in all of this, rest assured that it has emerged with even greater clarity and force in the second half of the 1980s.

What’s important to remember, however, is that Winters’ work is not merely a recapitulation of Modernist ideals. Nature is not a standard toward which painting strives in a committed search for purity, harmony and essence. Born of paint and painting, his diagrams instead insist on the inevitable interpenetration of cultural phenomena with natural ones--and on the unpredictable surprises that union always generates.

At MOCA at the Temporary Contemporary, 152 N. Central Ave., (213) 621-2766, through Jan . 12, 1992. Closed Monday.