Making Cheerful Symmetry

George Ortman spent five years making a chess set. He took time because he wanted the playing pieces to be symbols of themselves. The bishop was simple to design--a cross. The rook was square for solidity; the king was a diamond for a regal quality; the queen was a circle for femininity; the pawns were arrows for their singleness of direction. Ortman gave the knight the shape of a heart, for "it is impulsive and moves erratically."

Chess is an orderly, symbolic game, as Ortman, 37, is a man who makes orderly, symbolic art. "I grew up amid action painters," he explains, "and my reaction to all that is symmetry--order in a very strange world." Now teaching a course at New York University and co-director of the School of Visual Arts, he has a chance to preach what he practices. "People are no longer interested in what Mr. Green says to Mr. Red," says he of abstract expressionism, so he began making constructions that, at their onset, look like Playskool peg toys (see opposite page). Like Matisse, his favorite artist of the past 50 years,

Ortman cares for the brilliance of color set like flowers in a formal garden.

Breaking Down Gauguin. With jigsaw-puzzle patience, he paints, stretches, and inserts separate canvases within larger paintings, such as his Dyce Head, which goes on view next week in Manhattan's Howard Wise Gallery. Slight variations in the insert's edges lend solidity and weight to the overall emblematic energy of his image. Ortman intends the circles, squares and triangles as external symbols; the results are bright shields of canvas, heraldry for a modern machine age.

Though his constructions have had the brittle, balanced look of a Buck Rogers chessboard, recently Ortman has been going backward. He builds painting around a detailed formal analysis of past masters. He has broken down Gauguin's triptych Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?, Matisse's Piano Lesson, Botticelli's Allegory of Spring. Says he: "I try to find the actual construction of the painting with geometrical symbols. My subject matter is paint. Someone told me that art comes from art; I took it literally."

Avoiding Pedagogy. Botticelli, like a good Old Master, built his works up painstakingly from "cartoons," or planned-out sketches, of his subjects. Often the structure is artfully veiled. In what is graceful enough to avoid pedagogy, Ortman pierces Botticelli's elegant illusion. He analyzes the exacting geometry which the Renaissance artist imposed on his curvy allegory of the feverish season of love, spotlighting by colored panels the gestures that narrate the painting. As on the chessboard, where the rational, 64-square battleground can scarcely contain the emotional knight, Ortman does not let the truth of his analysis overwhelm beauty.

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