ecently, while looking at new alkyd-and-oil paintings by Steve Heimann, I suggested the round faces with large-but-fine features that populate the work were—according to whatever color and light played over them—the sun and the moon. "That's interesting," said Steve. "Some people see them as Yin and Yang..."

Heimann's work, in other words, is open to interpretation—and to inspiration. The artist himself cites Joan Miro and Paul Klee as guiding lights, although he is less-than-thrilled by the mention of Picasso ("His work was more about destruction."). Then there are the personal influences: growing up in New Jersey, an aunt and uncle would take Steve to the Russian Orthodox Church with them, where he was duly fascinated by the icons that abounded amid flickering candlelight.

Later, when he researched the matter, he discovered that icons had always been kept small for portability by monks on horseback, a fact much in keeping with Heimann's diminutively scaled masonite boards and oil-on-canvas (12 by 16 inches is standard). Heimann is big on research: along with Russian icons, he has been much taken with the art of primitive man, and has spent hours poring over tomes related to the subject.

Heimann, 39, attended Parsons School of Design (where he studied with painterly realist William Clutz) and the Art Students League. Yet his painting is purely his own—with low bows to Miro and Klee, and a nod, perhaps, to Fernand Leger. His titles are unflaggingly intriguing, paintings themselves are just as novel.

Take, for example, Sooth Sayer, 1997. A sun-, or moon-, or masklike face in deep reds stares out at us coolly from center canvas; the face seems both held in place and liberated by curvaceous arcs of gray stone to the left and right, supporting the sun, yet delimiting its influence. Indeed, the work is, tonally, quite dark, with a squared-off ground of black at the back. "Sooth" is certainly being said, for the abstract plastic disjunctions of the work are, somehow, all harmonious.

Indeed, Heimann's work serves to remind us that abstraction—even figurative abstraction—is often the toughest kind of painting to do, and do well. A background in figurative commercial art has served the painter well, freeing him up to improvise and invent where he will, and stick more strictly to the formal when need be.

Heimann is not, however, a decorative painter, if more than a few of his canvases contain areas of pure design—like a polka-dot area to the left hand of one work, or an area of treelike fleur-de-lis on another—the overall profundity of his larger images keeps the pieces firmly ballasted in the more primally evocative. In CatWalk II, 1997, that arclike shape that, thick or thin, usually accompanies the face in a semblance of the human form has, in a show of aboriginal gestation, grown fingers, fingers that tap at the top of its head. In Demagogue II, the effect is almost sculptural, with beige face swathed in black and a monolithic, ground-hugging gray supporting the face.

Occasionally, Heimann will so abstract his already abstract elements as to make for an all-over composition of great gravity and grace. Rudiment No. 1, for instance, lives up to its title: the moon appears, black and white, with a shock of thin-stringed hair, while the arm form reaches over and beyond it, all this against a rectangle of dull pink and an olive and turquoise ground. The primal is foregone in favor of the classically modern.

The same thing happens in Contemplating the Intrinsic Value of a Stick, but to a greater degree: the face has become a yellow sun (although there's a smaller, red and white face within it), while rectangles—and the infamous stick—play over it, all on a brushy brown ground. In these two paintings, Heimann is not only soothsayer, but sage, a sage who's wisely returning us to our modernist roots. Private visions, in other words, have gone public. Forget Neo-Geo. This is the real, irreducible thing.

Gerrit Henry

New York City, 2000

Gerrit Henry (1950-2003) was a contributing editor for Art News, and reviewed monthly for Art in America. He has published feature and critical articles in The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, People, After Dark, and Art International, and has served as art critic for The New Republic. A book of Mr. Henry's recent poems will be published soon by Groundwater Press. A documentary film about his life and work, directed by Neil Grayson, is scheduled for release in 2004.