ART REVIEW : Bengston and a Splash of Hollywood

Billy Al Bengston’s cosmological fantasies display all the complexity of a Disney film. Sure, one could argue that their energetic, colorful, graphically-contrived look is willfully naive, designed to comment upon our narrow, media-shaped conceptions of the universe. But I wouldn’t. The work is too deeply enamored of its own goofy charm to even realize it’s time to come up for a sobering shot of air.

The paintings are formulaic--a richly stained surface, much like that of a tie-dyed T-shirt, serves as a backdrop for a cavalcade of densely textured planetary spheres, speckled white constellations and jagged, black borders. Streaking across each canvas are the faint trails of shooting stars--nearly transparent veils of sparkling paint resembling nothing so much as klieg lights at a Hollywood premiere.

Bengston ups the cinematic ante by titling the works after Hollywood films which feature disasters of one sort of another--”Portrait of Jennie,” “One Million B.C.,” “The Grapes of Wrath.” However, it’s not at all clear that the visions of outer space to which they are attached refer to catastrophe. Instead, what they exude is smug contentment with things just the way they so very whimsically are. These works might make lively poster art. As paintings, they just don’t wash.