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For some, the single most memorable painting in the biennial was a large, creamily impasted canvas by Terry Winters, Good Government, 1984. A favorite subject for Winters, 36, is the taxonomy of natural form among lower organisms such as shells, fungi and seed pods. He likes the innumerable rhymes between these shapes and the way they can be assembled to mimic human affairs and hierarchies. (Just what the relation between the peanut shapes and the bluish, galena-like crystals beneath them in Good Government may be, can only be guessed at; but it seems, in some indirect way, to be social rather than formal.) Winters' drawing, which owes something to the late Philip Guston and much more to Cy Twombly's rapturous scribbling, looks clumsy but is not, and his paint surface has a wonderful astuteness, lush and scratchy by turns, full of tactile surprises and shifts of gear, and never boring.
In a quite different way, an artist like Donald Sultan, 34, monumentalizes the detail or the small motif by inflating and solidifying it. Sultan's paintings have a congealed look, thanks to their peculiar technique. They are in effect shallow reliefs, cut from a thick magma of bitumen. Their slow air of deliberation favors emblems but works against narrative. Since Sultan likes narrative scenes -- forest blazes, naval guns firing, oilfield burn-offs -- the result is often perverse: essentially decorative art strained through a "tough" medium. When on his other main subject, still life, Sultan is a suave designer who can invest the profiles of his lemons and tulips with a tautness and elegance.
Part of the ambition of Robert Moskowitz, 50, has been to bring some of the polemical, stripped-down imagery from Newman and Still -- a cliff of paint, a primal stripe of color -- back into the domain of the figurative. In Moskowitz's big oil-pastel panels, the image may seem elusive, and it is, not because it is veiled but because it is reduced to a fragment: the blue silhouette of an arm holding a plate is not quickly identifiable as a part of Myron's Discobolos. In such paintings, as in his series of variations on the silhouette of Rodin's Thinker, Moskowitz plays an uneasy game as a mediator between "sublimity" and cliche. The famous object, impotently muscle-bound by traditions of cultural hype, is cut down to a mere recognition-silhouette and then resuscitated as painting. Moskowitz's vision is less ironic than bleakly epic. In Iceberg, 1984, which depicts a dreadful shard of whiteness on an equally dreadful blackness, his cult of the isolated fragment serves a schematized vision of landscape -- obstinate, grand and pessimistic.
Then there is Susan Rothenberg: not a new artist (her reputation has been growing since the mid-'70s, when her big paintings of silhouette horses first hove in sight) but one of extreme psychic power. Rothenberg, too, is a painter of the expressive fragment, the single sign that stands for parts of the body (a hand, a mouth) or individual figures so eroded by space, so scraped down to a state of muffled and miserable representation that they have no tactility left in them.