The photographs consist of artificially composed interiors and landscapes. Pursuing beauty, in Twice Born terms, involves an incredible attention to arrangement and an absence (premeditated?) of the human form. The paintings seem prompted by an experimental fascination with shape, line, material and color. There is a prevailing sense of aggression and rigor in the creation of the "beautiful."
However, some of the pieces cultivate a much-needed passivity. Works that involve a surprising purity of color-huge saturated monochromatic paintings, such as Matt McClune's "Yellow Painting" and "White Painting," and Elsbeth Deser's approachable thick pink circles in "Three for Marianne Moore"-dilate attention and let beauty happen.
Most conspicuously located in the exhibit is Claire McConaughy's series of paintings, "Memory Flood." Reminiscent of massive footprints or glimpsed clouds, the deep indigo ink imprinted on stretched paper covers its own wall. It is held together by its own repeating patterns, its kaleidoscopic structure, yet is full of a necessary and freeing space. Across the room, Emily Cheng's oil-on-canvas "Silent Elaborations" overtly draws the eye to its center. It's a two-dimensional theater, drapery framing the precious vision of a highly ornate object, the jeweled product of careful work.
A notable feature of the exhibition is its roundtable discussion series. Speaking about their work and its relation to beauty, the artists talked about the materiality of art-making. Jasmina Danowski described mixing her orange and ochre-greens for her piece "Playing for Stalemate" and watching how her media moved on wood panels and the "layering play" of application: "I rubbed with walnut oil, sanded, walnut oil, sanded...it felt good." The pleasure, the sensuous experience of art-making, was frequently cited by the artists.
The exhibit's traditional problem of finding beauty summons still more useful theoretical supplements. It presents a rather heavy-handed attention to the philosophical character of artistic experience-the gallery notes include a short reading list of classical aesthetic theory along with recent writings from the past 20 years, touching on Elaine Scarry, Monroe Beardsley and, obliquely, Kant and Burke.
The problem of intentionality suggests that the mental, imaginative work is less the viewer's and more the purposive intent of translation-from the real world to the artist's mind, artist's mind to the real world and from the real world to the viewer's mind. Twice Born: Beauty reminds us to witness all of these. It reminds us that there is, after all, much to be learned by taking aesthetic theories outside and exercising them. It moves beyond apology for the beautiful and towards informed enquiry, suggesting a faculty of imagination that recognizes beauty and a skill of observation somewhere between active attention and cultivated passivity.
Twice Born: Beauty runs through Nov. 5 at the Mills Gallery of the Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont St., near the Back Bay/South End stop on the Orange Line. For more information, call 426-7700.