Jess: A Grand Collage 1951-1993

Reclusive, visionary California artist Jess (who dropped his surname, Collins, in the 1950s) ransacks images from myth, folklore, the occult, children's books, Art Nouveau and Victorian engravings to create dreamy allegories and romantic landscapes. His collages, which owe a debt to Max Ernst's hallucinatory pastiches, create ironic, paradoxical alternate universes, often involving thousands of pasted-on images. Thickly impastoed, relief-like oils transform found images into fantastical mindscapes. Other pictures expand upon the symbolism of Tarot cards, Sufi and gnostic texts or the verse of Jess's longtime companion, poet Robert Duncan (who died in 1988). This catalogue of a touring exhibit that opened at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., where Auping is chief curator, limns an individualist who, during the 1940s, worked as an engineer on the Manhattan Project making plutonium, only to later renounce physics for metaphysics. (Nov.)