Aerogyls & Tellurins

He lives in Mexico, but to judge from the pictures he paints, it might as well be the Mountains of the Moon. He calls his paintings Spatiales, Gyras, Tellurins, Erouns, Aerogyls and Cosmogones. They look it. Wolfgang Paalen, a shy, high-domed man of 37, an Austrian count, will have no truck with organized surrealism and abstractionism; they are too literary and cold for his taste.

Last week a show of his singular, science-inspired visualizations enlivened Manhattan's super-surrealistic Art-of-this-Century gallery. Executed in brilliant, Van Gogh-like splashes of color, they show objects (mostly humans) as they might look if broken down to their cellular essentials. Likewise, they show Painter Paalen's idea of "pure spatial tensions" and "inner tensions of landscapes" (basi cally whorls and spirals). The net result: "plastic cosmogony" -- which means, he says, "no longer a symbolization or interpretation but, through the specific means of art, a direct visualization of the forces which move our mind and body." Wolfgang Paalen not only splashes words around -- he edits and publishes a slick, desperately esoteric, semiannual literary-art magazine called Dyn -- but he in vents a few, too. Whenever he hits on an idea for showing an object in a new, analytical way, he coins a name for it.

Thus Gyra is an abstract figure study, a Tellurin is a landscape (with inner tensions). The most ambitious painting in his current show is Les Cosmogones (see cut}, a vast, wildly spinning composition with a hell of a lot of tension in it.

Whatever they got out of Paalen's visualizations, gallerygoers were liable to be alarmed by the show's catalogue. It said, threateningly: "It is no longer the task of art to answer naive questions. Now, it is the painting which will look at the spectator and ask him: what do you represent?"

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