Topography from Lilliput

In a season when paintings have grown large enough to require flatcars for easels, and brushstrokes have turned into mighty walls of color bright enough to divert low-flying aircraft, a Lilliputian touch is welcome. Such is the mark of Italy's Gianfranco Baruchello, 41, whose works seem painted with a brush one millimeter wide to produce meticulous yet mysterious images that float across glossy white panels like microbes creeping from an infested imagination.

"Painting is my language," says Baruchello, son of an Italian lawyer. Neither pop nor op, his vocabulary is intellectual, full of hints--a Proustian complex of personal remembrance. And he inscribes his nib's nuances as if they were the scientific jiggling track of his own electroencephalograph. "To throw a pot of paint at a canvas is not my language," he says. "Images are like sounds--complicated. We communicate in complicated sounds. I communicate in com plicated images."

He refuses to supply a dictionary for his thickly poetical paintings, which went on view last week in Manhattan's Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery. At a quick glance, they seem like wall scribblings, or graffiti, which suggest the vocabulary of dreams. A tryptich entitled High Plateau of Uncertainty is complete with contours numbered to indicate altitudes.

Another theme is labeled Inferiority Complex. And the tiny images that speckle these works are ciphers but also reference points dotted on the topography of his own thoughts. A cartoon imitation of a World War I biplane suggests war; corsets and garter belts spell out the paraphernalia of lust; a woman's pelvis is decorated with the design of a jet engine. "The life force," says Baruchello, "is supplied with fuel from two reservoirs--love and fear."

His work is surreal, finicky, and owes much to Dada. Baruchello has even done a portrait, titled Chemical Inducers in Marcel Duchamp's Brain, of that venerable, revamped Dadaist. Painted on three layers of Plexiglas, the portrait is a phrenologist's delight, with arrows depicting the flow of nervous energy and vague images suggesting visual ideas. Like the autobiographical trinkets strewn through Baruchello's work, it is the facsimile of an artist's mind.

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