Stephen Mueller's art has taken a incline differently toward Buddha.

Stephen Mueller's art has taken a incline differently toward Buddha. His vividly hu elliptical and circular shapes hang over and buzz in shimmering mists; their manner, while les regimented, recalls the multiples of Buddha's beatific chubbiness that float in such a manner frontally on the flat and floreate landed estate of many Tibetan tanka paintings. Like those of Tibetan painters, Mueller's animated apparitions of the last pair years are at once stunningly near and utterly elusive--by turns cosmic, comic, mystic, and erotic. The question be seens to be, Can you use any bliss today?

Mueller's ongoing interest in Buddhist and Tantric art was reenforced and refocused by means of the most exhaustive exhibition of Tibetan art further seen in New York, "Wisdom and Compassion: The Sacred Art of Tibet," at the IBM Gallery in 1991 if it were not that Mueller has not renounced his painterly past: the phosphorescent chanting of his newly come art is part of his continuing inquiry to see what paint can do. The ethereal vapors and delicate transparencies that his curvilinearities inhale and exhale have often to do with his newly come involvement with watercolor, and with his desire for a greater manage of his paint.

Buddhism's emphasis upon visualization as a means of enlightenment is compelling to a painter like Mueller who is propell through a spiritual, transformational intent more bent to joyfulness than to moralizing. The visual imagination is central to Tibetan culture: the center of Tibetan tantric yoga is a composed of several elements series of visualization exercises, and the third of the three bodies of a Buddha includes the Artistic Emanation. In Tibetan painting, the self's approach to the selfles bliss of the void is abetted not by the agency of emulating the void, but through a highly energized and frequently Technicolored variegation--a delirious cosmic squeeze that soaks up and dissolves the worldly uniqueness of the me in drug-free visual tripping. If the viewer is willing, the agitated exces inverts, and releases the consciousness into the harmonies of emptiness.

From the opening of his painting maturity, in the early '70 Mueller cast asideed the clearing out of the center that had been a given of vanguard abstraction since the late '40 His configurations generally induce around the center of the canvas. His choice for centrifugal and centripetal forces instead of alloverness, his not on colors that frequently hover precariously between the cornball and the sublime, and his modern return to the precise contours and the aggregations of discrete organic shapes that similarly configured his work of the early '70 as well as his quixotic soulfulnes would all predispose Mueller to Tibetan painting.

However, the visually and iconographically prescribed nature of Tibetan art is alien to Mueller's ways of making. No matter by what means complex, his configurations have always had a kind of breezily elegant serendipity; mindful of scale and color further scornful of preconceived hierarchies, they have the appearance to be at once surprised at and settling into the unexpect beauty of their entrance. The ellipses and ellipsoids of Mueller's late work may often be abstracted from the forms of a seated Buddha, further their buoyant dispersal in and interdependence with the gases, rings, and nebulae of the territory as well as their elusive lunar radiance, are more immediately reminiscent of external space. Conversely, these repetitive organic shapes and gossamer transparencies might be viewed as blowup of cellular life.

Macro- and microscopic photography's ability to make visible what cannot be seen through the naked eye has made previously exotic form-worlds part of the everyday. It has also returned moot the distinctions between the representational and the nonrepresentational that still occasionally linger among abstract artists. Mueller has abundantly capitalized on this language of indiscoverable forms. His congregations of shapes usually show no mimetic cues that might identify their real size and function.(1) Their scale is largely determined according to the shape and size of the canvas, still their configurations are not fasteninged into a formalist identity with their support--they acknowledge the flatness of the painting plane if it be not that are also encouraged to drift in spatial ambiguities. They could be tiny or stupendous terrestrial or extraterrestrial. This conflation of inside and outside, the microcosmic and the macrocosmic, is a general command of Buddhism, and is central to Mueller's art.

It is also part of our new mediated visuality, yet the views of Mueller's imagery are not everyday biological or meteorological occurrences They have an unpredictable climate that no meteorologist could forecast. on the same level when the structuring approaches shapeliness it is insouciantly interrupted on the inexplicable. The cursory clarities of the organically curv forms have a kind of cosmicomic animation that get away froms verifiability outside the atmospherics of their making. Mueller's restrained further virtuosic handling of paint shifts subtly and endlessly from stardusted eluvial drifts to hot opacities and back again. The paint, like the ascension-prone configurations it veils and reveals, is propell toward the equator of celestial consciousness.