The Brooklyn Rail

The oeuvre of the late avant-garde filmmaker and visual artist Jordan Belson (1926–2011), like most good art, defies any easy description and interpretation. “I’ve come to have a complete mistrust of words,” Belson remarked, saying that, “it’s a glorious thing if you don’t expect an explanation.” Belson’s confounding and extraordinarily beautiful works of art foreground the formal, sensuous, and spiritual, making any analysis a marked challenge. An abundance of words hardly makes a dent in his scintillating, esoteric vision.

His abstractions evoke everything from cellular mitosis, the movement of planetary bodies, and veering subatomic particles to tantric mandalas and hallucinogenic experiences, all of which are part of his intentional fusion of art, science, and mysticism. Belson had, in the words of exhibition curator Raymond Foye, a “belief in non-objective art as an all-encompassing aesthetic,” and pursued it with great skill and purpose. “Abstract” and “non-objective” remain inadequate terms, however, since Belson considered his work to be a record of experienced psychic states and sensations.

Now at Matthew Marks Gallery until June 29, Foye, in collaboration with the estate of the artist, has organized a revelatory exhibition of nearly thirty works on paper made between 1950 and 1965, most of which are being shown publicly for the first time. This is the second major exhibition of Belson’s work, the first of which Foye organized for Marks in 2019. While the first presentation introduced the visionary artist to the public, this new exhibition instead reveals something of the method to his madness. Many pieces are directly linked—visually, thematically, and technically—to several of his early animated films, notably Mambo (1951), Caravan (1952), and Mandala (1953).

Despite the works revealing little in terms of “meaning” or the method of their making, this vagueness does not mean vagueness of expression. All are precise, deliberate, and flawless. It is not surprising that Belson made an early living as a graphic designer, typographer, and engraver, becoming an expert in multiple media.

Belson’s Brain Drawings (1952) demonstrate a fascination with the mind’s inner workings and biological systems, appearing like microscopic details of brain cells, pulsing veins, and firing neurons. They are reminiscent of French poet and painter Henri Michaux’s “mescaline drawings” from a few years later and were inspired by his similar use of hallucinogenic substances.

Belson’s Peacock Book drawings (1952) are rhythmic, almost fractal, in their evocation of macro- and micro-scale worlds suffused with animated marks and emergent lifeforms. These come from a one-hundred-page notebook of Chinese paper and are rendered in ink and pastel. Their scale is intimate, in contrast to a filmic/cinematic experience of the big screen. These reveal a more playful and intuitive kind of mark-making and compositional arrangement than the contemporarily executed rice paper drawings (including both the single-cell works and longer scrolls). One extraordinary work of ink and pastel on paper, Untitled (1952), splits the difference between the Peacock Book and the rice paper drawings, which have by far the most compositional symmetry. In this drawing, which is banded along its perimeter by a narrow silver strip, whirling spheres of vibratory pastels are sewn together in a tight hierarchical arrangement, resembling circuit boards or peculiar mechanisms with lines of electric current and rotating wheels and gears. It also resembles an astrological or astronomical chart registering celestial motions.

The standouts of the exhibition are undoubtedly the single-cell rice paper drawings and related vertically oriented scrolls, the latter of which are roughly seventy inches tall and engage the viewer on a corporeal scale. Upon close inspection, however, Belson’s details reign supreme. Executed with vibrantly colored or metallic pigments—and enhanced by a tour de force of gallery lighting—these works seem to glow with an inner radiance. Sharp outlines of rotating and spinning orbs, rendered by means of a ruling pen and compass, pair beautifully with Belson’s expert application of shading, made with an atomizer. This tool is different from an airbrush and requires a great amount of lung power and skill. By flicking bits of pigment onto paper from a toothbrush, Belson was also able to attain a scattered particulate effect. He then photographed all these works to transform them into individual cells for the three animated films mentioned previously. He would later cut these long scrolls into single units or alternately into groups of two, four, or more, roll them up, and place them in his closet, where they remained until his death.

Another exceptional work, Untitled from 1965, which visually inaugurates the exhibition, makes use of colored and printed papers collaged in concentric rings. A matte black disc at its center punctuates the composition, around which appears a printed circular image of a nebula, a luminescent region of interstellar medium. The image doubles as an eye—with the void of the pupil and surrounding iris—connecting the notion of human vision itself to its capacity to reveal hidden forms of knowledge. Yet while vision reveals, it cannot ever authoritatively explain. As Belson wrote, “I complete the work and I’m not even certain what I’ve depicted there. Hidden Formations.”