Abstract art has puzzled, dazzled since it hit canvas

In art, there are few more puzzling, more difficult to define approaches than abstraction.

Like the style itself, the Fine Art Center's new exhibition, "Colorado Springs Abstract," is sprawling, and if you think too hard about it, quite slippery to pin down.

It's not surprising, then, that curator Blake Milteer's ambitious spin on two Denver abstract shows will not connect all the conceptual dots for you. In fact, the 80-piece survey, which comfortably fills the vast El Pomar Gallery, is likely to generate more questions than answers about the nature of abstraction.

Which is a good and all-too-rare thing. Thinking, that is. In a regional museum.

But that breadth - from Charles Bunnell's turn-of-the-century experimentation to contemporary apostles including Holly Parker, Betty Ross or Bill Hyer - has a downside: It's a bit like walking into a movie an hour in: You spend a lot of time sussing who's who and what's what, leaving with only a vague idea of how it all fits together.

Abstraction arose, some might argue, as early impressionism, which fractured centuries of faithful representation into beautiful bits of light. Certainly, many of the movements that followed - from fauvism to cubism to abstract expressionism, and on and on - took ever firmer steps away from the visual language of the Renaissance.

Abandoning the "old green world of flesh and bone," artists as different as Léger and Pollock created new pictorial spaces and art, freed - as Kasimir Malevich once said - "from the ballast of objectivity." It was a revolution that propelled art into an entirely new universe of expression and, at the same time, popularized the expression "my 5-year-old could have made that."

In America, the style came into its own between 1930 and 1950. In Colorado Springs, abstraction made its first footprint at The Broadmoor Art Academy, which, in 1936, became the Fine Arts Center School. Those early years are the core of this show, giving an important snapshot of the artists' exploration of color, form and texture untethered from reality.

Works including Bunnell's series of untitled and undated paintings take abstraction into a pure direction. The soft-spoken squares of color and mark-making evoke the quality of a misty nowhere of dreams and idle calculations.

In one, nuggets of red and yellow strain against faint scribblings that are neither words nor mathematics but feel strangely akin to both.

Even from across the room, modernist giant Robert Motherwell collars you with just three images, all made decades after his yearlong tenure, in 1954, at the Fine Arts Center School. The slashing black brush strokes, spidery brown lines and beauty marklike paint spatters of "Lament for Lorca" (1990) might be the muscular slashing of a gestural painter.

But then there's the lithograph's title, which refers to poet and dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca, who was executed by Spanish fascists in 1936.

Does "Lament" need that layer of information? No. Spare and anxious on the creamy paper, it speaks its own potent language loud and clear.

But like a lot of work here, the title helps orient our thinking, satisfying our natural yearning for meaning or intention - anything to help decode the image.

There are works here that are simply beautiful, a quality that for some viewers has meaning enough. Dawn Wilde's recent large-scale paintings are a riot of color, movement and organic form. Like Wilde's work, Corey Drieth's gemlike pieces of pigment on wood planks are strangely poetic, but with the quiet simplicity of a Zen koan. The same is true of Holly Parker's imagistic imprints of found pools of oil and dirt, called "Untitled (Roman Buses I-IIIV)."

At the center of it all, Bill Burgess' sculptures demand attention. Some are gritty; some are sleek and invite a caress. Exquisite.

Too often, though, the work is constrained by Burgess' mythic titles: for instance, "Osiris," which is shiny stainless steel tubing coiled on a rusted base of wilting steel. A piece of painted steel seems to rise on the short coil, suggesting the eternal cycle of life and death over which the Egyptian god ruled. Here, the form is so strong that a title with such clear associations shut down my own exploration.

As much as I liked his work, I blame Burgess for dominating gallery space that seating might have inhabited: Abstraction benefits from the kind of communion only a nice bench can offer.

"COLORADO SPRINGS ABSTRACT"

When: Through April 19
Where: Fine Arts Center, 30 W. Dale St.
Tickets: $10, $8.50 students and seniors, members free; 634-5583, csfineartscenter.org
Something else: Wear good walking shoes, there aren't nearly enough benches.