s the end of the 20th century begins dominating our horizon, and all our thinking and dreams point toward the impending closure of an age, many art world institutions and individuals have vigorously speculated about what art is vital, what will remain vital, what the next century might find useful, and what best characterizes this century. The question is not about stasis, about finding the right niche for an eminent work of art, be it painting or literature. It is not even about whether or not our heirs will read the dark enigmatic fables of Franz Kafka or look at the gracefully exultant paintings of Kasimir Malevich. Rather, more than how and why particular works embody the time in which they were made, the critical question asks that each work possess a telling feature, that is, something specifically telling about that age or moment in time. It is the very powerful telling nature of the works in this exhibition that gives them their potency and compelling presence. This inherent capacity for telling goes far beyond the anecdotal and both defines and inhabits a realm where decay, disorder, and death are no longer so threatening, and where the elusive and frightening mysteries of an invisible world become urgent subjects of an ambitious quest for the real. It could be said that what is true for all the artists in this exhibition is their commitment to live within a world where the instant can be transformed into the eternal, and that they all express the belief that it is possible for them to discover and define a place where time doesn't stand still so much as welcomes us home.

Having said this, one returns to a basic question: What do these works of art tell us about the nature of human existence during a century of wars, madness, and despair, about what it was like to be alive at a time when both small hopes and immense hopelessness filled the air? In the realm of painting, more so than sculpture, this question changes slightly: What do the immediacy of sensations and perceptions embodied in a particular painter's work tell us about the nature of human existence, about living in a finite world? But beyond whether the artist's primary vehicle is painting or sculpture, abstraction or figuration, the question these resolute individuals confront is their relationship to time's passing, to the fact that for all the power of their imagination and will, they remain individuals caught within the web of change and inevitability.

t should be stated that the works presented in this exhibition do not in any way form a single, unified group. For the most part, the artists neither subscribed to any of the modernist movements such as Surrealism, nor did they fit conveniently into any particular epochal upsurge, such as Abstract Expressionism. They have largely been defined as isolated figures, individuals who marked out their own path. It is no surprise then that some of them, like Adolf Wolfli and Martin Ramirez, have been defined as "outsiders" and were considered social outcasts, and that others, like Alfred Jensen, H.C. Westermann and Jess, have been defined as "strange" and "eccentric" figures working at the margins of mainstream art.

While these terms seem to have a certain validity, they also marginalize the artists and diminish their work. Terms such as "outsider" and "eccentric" suggest that these artists have at best a tenuous relationship to mainstream art, whether it is Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, or Minimalism. However, I would like to propose that despite such marginalizing labels, there are a number of important affinities the artists in this exhibition share. These affinities not only collapse those edifices of art history based on formal or stylistic categories such as abstraction and figuration, and their emphasis on the arbitrary hierarchy of mainstream art, but they also underscore both the ongoing centrality of their concerns and the continued vitality of their vision. I would also like to propose that the issues I've raised in this exhibition do not arise from the similarities of the work, thus making it a stylistically unified exhibition, which clearly it isn't, but from the meaning their modalities makes tangible. For not only do these artists transform the invisible and its various manifestations (infinity, the self, dreams, time's passing, mortality, and memory) into visible proof, but they also transform the imaginary into undeniable evidence.

lfred Jensen made his first mature paintings in the early 1950s, when Abstract Expressionism was in its heyday. These paintings utilized a prismatic palette, which was based on Jensen's research of Goethe's color theory, and around 1957 he began developing his theoretical diagrammatic paintings. My Oneness, A Universe of Colours (1957), is a singular example from this period of Jensen's career. At the core of Jensen's work is his belief that there is a harmony which balances, as well as joins, oppositions such as male/female, light/dark, positive/negative, and unity/multiplicity.

Jensen banished randomness and chance from his work because he believed that there was deeper, divine order governing time and existence. Consequently, he understood his palette, which consisted of black and white (the parents of all color) and primary and secondary colors, to be an instrument of light. instead of using a brush, which the artist believed would interrupt the connection between the light and the canvas or paper, he squeezed his color directly from the tube onto the surface. For Jensen, the "oneness" of his "self-identity" is made up of concentric circles of prismatic light and black and white. He understands light's non-material existence and paint's palpable presence to be interchangeable, that each can be transformed into the other. This understanding is for him visible evidence of one of the great, constant problems of metaphysics. He explains the invisible world in terms of the relationship of number and color, a most ambitious and ambiguous theory whose proof exists in this very painting, the accuracy of which, I might add, is not as important as the passion with which it was advanced.

In contrast to the Abstract Expressionists, particularly artists such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, who worked in a reductive, essentializing manner, Jensen brought together a wide number of sources and branches of knowledge: literature, astrology, alchemy, numerical systems, the Mayan calendar, the religions of Ancient China and Egypt, and Pythagorean theory, among them. One of the forces connecting all of these studies together is Jensen's belief in Goethe's color theory, which was more mystical than scientific. For both Goethe and Jensen, all light (color) is symbolic. Within Jensen's world view, no distinction can be made between fact and theory.

Forrest Bess, like Alfred Jensen, believed that opposites, particularly male/female, could be unified. And like Jensen, though in a very different way, Bess was determined to reinvest symbols with resonant meaning. Bess believed it was possible for him to recover the mythical realities that are an inextricable part of archaic and preliterate signs. In an article he published in his local paper in 1951, Bess wrote: "I term myself a visionary artist for lack of a better word. Something seen otherwise than by ordinary light. I can dose my eyes in a dark room and if there is no outside noise or attraction, plus, if there is no conscious effort on my part - then I can see colors, lines, patterns, and forms that make up my canvases. I have always copied these arrangements without elaboration."

For Bess, the "colors, lines, and patterns" bubbling up into his consciousness were symbols which proved the existence of the collective unconscious linking all human beings together throughout time. For Bess, and this is something he shares with Jensen, both color and image are symbolic and irrefutable proof. There are signs for the mate and female parts of the body. The linear marks are a way of counting time. A young woman is a crescent moon, which may be placed inside a sun-like symbol, which stands for man.

In Untitled (1959) the central image occupying the top third of the painting can be read as a phallus; the radiating circle can be read as an anus; and the triangles can be read as cuts, which were Bess's sign for the transformation of the male into a hermaphrodite, the ideal figure embodying male and female aspects. For Bess, who claimed he did not elaborate upon his visions, every daub and smear of paint has meaning. Paint is both a substance and an instrument for making the invisible visible.