SUCCESS THROUGH FAILURE

PAINTER Fernando Gerassi believes that nothing succeeds like failure. "Each time you fail," he says, "you learn something. If you have faith in yourself you accept the failure and go on. The more failures the better." This philosophy has seen Gerassi through some dark times, and brought him to a point where he may have to abandon it. Gerassi's first exhibition in 20 years opens next week at Manhattan's Panoras Gallery, and is likely to be a smashing success.

The pictures relate to no particular school or fashion, carry no message. They are not meant to stun, dazzle, or instruct the viewer, but simply to be enjoyed. Gerassi clearly enjoyed painting each one. They have the brightness, boldness and paradoxical vagueness that six-year-olds generally bring to painting, but behind the pictures' ebullience lies a highly sophisticated intelligence. Gerassi's Magic Mountains (right) is done with rockbottom economy of means: a few horizontal stripes, one with a sawtooth edge. To those who demand recognizable details, it may seem little more than a close-up of a rusty saw. But taken on its own terms, as evocation rather than description, it can have the misty morning grandeur of a mirage that stays. The Sun Is Never Alone presents a more complex image in almost equally simple terms. The red and black crescent shapes supporting the sun's molten disk through the dusk can be read as clouds, a bird, a fish, a sailboat, or all four combined.

Painter Gerassi is a heavy-muscled, egg-bald man of 55 who talks with staccato forcefulness in a thick accent--English was the last of many languages he picked up. Raised in Spain, he first resolved to be a philosopher, went to Germany to study. "I wanted to find out the sense of life," he recalls. "I found out you don't find out anything but speculations."

A trip to Italy convinced Gerassi that what he really wanted in life was to paint pictures. To make a living while painting, he has tried his hand at some 40 different jobs. He came to the U.S. at the start of World War II, got an art teaching post at Vermont's Putney School three years later. Today his Ukrainian-born wife teaches modern languages at the school, while Gerassi paints in their two-room, picture-crammed cottage, or wanders over the Vermont hills.

Such peaceful, secluded living has served to heighten the chief quality of Gerassi's paintings: a warm and sunny kind of innocence. But the simplicity actually springs from an arduous process of trial and error--from "failures," as he says.

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