Jordan Belson: Landscapes

After his death in 2011, Jordan Belson underwent a metamorphosis. He became a metaphor for experimental cinema of the kind produced by Norman McLaren, Kenneth Anger, and Stan Brakhage, though his was the kind of mind-blowing visual blasting some of us only experienced dancing through the strobe lights at Andy Warhol’s Dom, with Chelsea Girls (1966) flickering in the background.

Belson’s movies, unlike these fourteen collages all produced around 1970, take the “move” part of movie very seriously: World, also from 1970, is a cinematic meditation on the big bang, with pulsating shapes emanating from a circular central core until a central orb materializes. All accompanied by music, yet another medium Belson explored, also defined by movement. So, there are two Belsons: the filmmaker committed to transforming, transformative works that open doors into dynamic psychic realities and these collaged landscapes, where he explores an aesthetic of the static.

Landscape is fixity, a pondering of a state of being in the world or, rather, the remaking of nature in the images of geometry. It may begin with the real world, but it ends with the unreality of an artistic surface. Belson’s point of departure is Japanese chigiri-e, the tearing and cutting of sheets of colored paper (a Japanese obsession, as readers of The Tale of Genji will recall) which are then rearranged to represent landscapes, an art form imported into Japan from China during the Heian Period (794–1185), when Chinese influence was at its peak. Ink and metallic dust were added to the juxtaposed shards of paper, and Belson follows suit by incorporating pigment into these astonishing pieces.

One antecedent for these collages, at the visual if not the material level, could be the pastel landscapes Piet Mondrian made early in the twentieth century. Belson’s surfaces also appear crystallized and granular. We detect this peculiar texturing in the first work encountered upon entering Matthew Marks’s rectangular, north-south oriented gallery space. This untitled (none of the works have titles) 9 by 12 piece in Room 1 is almost a homage to Josef Albers’s harmonic sequencing of color. With the eye moving from left to right, from brilliance to darkness, we see how the color subtly modulates from a yellow-orange with occasional mauve specks that multiply into a full mauve on the right. We may take the whole as a landscape with water below, rugged mountains above, and a sunset in the upper register, but what we are really seeing is color juxtapositions, Belson’s painstaking transformation of one shade into another.

On the gallery’s south wall, we find a deceptively plausible 12 1/2 by 17 1/2 piece. It might be an excerpt from a Winslow Homer, with foaming waves crashing into a cliff-like coast, but it’s actually a performance in which the pale green in the upper register evolves into the dark green of the lower register. Assuming a mimetic reality for this piece is an exercise in self-deception. This is not a marine work, but an exercise in color control. This same lure of representation appears on the gallery’s west wall in what seems to be a full moon hanging in a sky. Here, Belson explores a dark-to-light modulation, with the moon shape simply constituting a marker for the eye in its journey from obscurity to brilliance.

Where deceptive understanding of these collages reaches its highest point is in a 9 by 12 work on the gallery’s east wall. It might be a vision of hell, a close-up of an erupting volcano spewing lava into the sky, or simply the end of the world. It is, of course, none of these things. This is pure abstraction, wedding the gestural to the geometric. The random “sparks” floating above the raging “fire” below are scraps of emotion hemmed in by the broad green band at the bottom in a kind of dynamic tension. How Belson achieved these effects using paper and pigment would require both psychological and archeological research. Suffice it to say that the brilliance of these modestly sized works makes us gasp at the thought they’ve been invisible for half a century.