Orderly chaos Craig Stockwell, Yizhak Elyashiv, and Ken Beck’s objects of desire BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS
	"Craig Stockwell: Perfectly Useless" Genovese/Sullivan Gallery, 450 Harrison Avenue, Boston | through October 4 "Ken Beck: Echt Beck""Yizhak Elyashiv: Prints and Drawings from Ireland 2000–2004" Gallery NAGA, 67 Newbury Street, Boston | through October 6

Maybe the most surprising aspect of Craig Stockwell’s abstract paintings of bountiful, rounded, geometric forms is how they imprint themselves on the mind’s eye. It’s hard at first to imagine why these variously sized sets of sometimes separate, sometimes interlocking shapes resembling rolling pins and squared-off horseshoes should have the power to enchant. The paintings seldom veer from repetitions of the same two shapes, and except for the "Tantric" series of 39 small paintings and one large piece from a different series, Stockwell’s colors are as muted as his forms are serial — cloudy yellows, vague lavenders, self-effacing greens.

Yet for all their flat, almost industrial appearance as individual units, as a conglomerate his forms look alive. Forms merge and separate, crowd one another and disperse, fade or come into view. You get the feeling you’re looking through a microscope at the magnified early stages of the birth of a biological machine. Indeed, one of the tensions Stockwell exploits throughout "Perfectly Useless" at Genovese/Sullivan Gallery is between the activity we associate with the organic and the stasis we attribute to the lifeless; the works look as if they were in the act of reproducing themselves while at the same time appearing manufactured. Cellular division meets circuit board, creating the impression of matter both mindful and mindless, chaotic and preordained. Stockwell’s art becomes a meditation on the proximity and mutability of the living and the unalive.

And that’s not the only way he dramatizes this strange mélange of the life force with its opposite — movement and change mingled with stasis and mechanical repetition. Particularly in the large works, darker forms appear to lie on top of submerged, lighter forms; despite their flatness, the paintings have depth. Further, Stockwell allows us to see the faint pencil markings of perfect circles traversed by straight lines, presumably the original grid of the work’s beginning. The result is a sense of dimensionality in time as well as space. You get the impression of looking into a three-dimensional mass as well as looking through to its creation. The sharp, curvaceous black outline of a form — in most, they’re the shape of the forms lying beneath; in others they look like drunk haloes or whirling lassos — appear to lift off the panels altogether.

Stockwell’s drawings offer, as drawings often do, an insight into the coherence and complexity of the paintings. Biomorphic shapes that could be the outlines of huge amœbae float over a thin pencil sea of the same circles and lines that are barely traceable in the paintings. The drawings lack both color and articulated shapes, but that’s not a loss. If anything, the tension becomes more pitched, less attenuated — the early life form pulsates on a plane of architectural notation. Stockwell’s is an analytic art, an effort to resolve and embody the contradictory impulses of chaos and control.

A similar spirit in a more pared-down and natural style is evident in the powerful new works of Yizhak Elyashiv, who shares a dynamic exhibit with Ken Beck at Gallery NAGA. His centerpiece is a monumental, wall-sized work (72 x 120) of 10 contiguous paper panels that coalesce into what looks like a Japanese landscape seen through a mesh of straight lines, Hebrew letters, and flowering vines. Untitled landscape with text (70 names) looks both tumultuous and stolid, an eruption of smaller, erratic shapes against a simple outline of a mountain formation. It’s a visual orchestration of color and form that comes across like a Brahms symphony for its grandeur of spirit, its mellifluence, and just the tiniest trace of the didactic. (Compare it with the similarly monumental Chinese landscapes Roy Lichtenstein did at the end of his life.)

The smaller Untitled triptych comprises three separately framed vertical embossings. The flat parts of the paper resonate in a rich, golden beige; the raised patterns — they move vertically and look like fractured letters from an alien alphabet — are a cloudy white. Scrambled language, indecipherable code, musical notation on LSD — whatever the shapes are, they allude to unrealized communication in their mute beauty. In another, still smaller piece, fine lines, not quite bilaterally symmetrical, fan out from an uneven spine in the lower half of the frame; above, there’s nothing, like the fossil of a thousand-ribbed fish in a dry riverbed. Get near enough and you discover that each hair-thin line is associated with an almost erased, precisely calligraphed number. It isn’t a fossil after all, but an effort to quantify a slice of the infinite.

Ken Beck is a master of a different sort, one who paints oversized images of commonplace objects with the kind of gusto that stops you in your tracks. Honeycomb Jar is vintage Beck: the luminous, lidded orange jar that fills almost the entirety of its 28x24 panel doesn’t look as if a light were shining on it so much as if it were emanating light; it all but vibrates. Centered in its frame, perched on a wooden ledge, the jar might burst from its confinement with the grooves on its two sides inviting in the narrow surrounding of black space.

Beck knows that to crop an image tightly while exaggerating its proportions will make it seem monumental and immediate — qualities he undercuts and underscores with his quotidian subject matter. (I’m reminded of the similar if less urbane æsthetic in the kind of vintage B horror flicks where a grasshopper measures in at 20 feet.) But his strengths aren’t just compositional; they’re as much about texture and color. Vermont is a similarly sized jar that appears to have been painted over in a palpable crust of oil. Wide, viscous smears of paint rise off the surface of the picture plane. Across the front of the otherwise metal gray jar, emerald green flecks, the same emerald green that makes up the narrow edging of the background, become a gentle yet ironic reminder of the arbitrariness of all seeing. The tombstone-like vessel isn’t, of course, a vessel at all, any more than the background is actually behind it.

Years ago, a friend confessed that the first time he saw Edward Weston’s Pepper No. 30, he had the embarrassing urge to get it on with a vegetable. Ken Beck’s imagery — gargoyles, fire hydrants, measuring spoons — isn’t the stuff of erotic thrill, but its sensuality is equally intense.