For his seventh solo exhibition at Greene Naftali, Richard Hawkins presents a new series of works that pay tribute to the self-taught artist Forrest Bess (1911-77). Bess found his way to painting after a stint in the army, as a therapeutic practice—a means of recording and coming to grips with the visions he experienced behind closed eyes at the edges of sleep. The potent, clarion images he saw in this preconscious state spurred a singular body of work, with biomorphic shapes and abstracted landscapes that lock the eye and rivet attention.

A bait fisherman from the Gulf Coast of Texas who showed with Betty Parsons and corresponded with Meyer Schapiro and Carl Jung, Bess tread a fine line between exclusion and access that eventually afforded him cult status in the art world. He died in relative obscurity but has since become a lodestar for contemporary practice—a painter’s painter who, for Ken Okiishi, continues to “emerge as a holy grail of glimmering and elusive marginality.” Hawkins’s own work often draws on historical precedent, channeling figures from Mike Kelley to Antonin Artaud; but Bess is the longest-standing object of his artistic fascination. Hawkins also hails from rural Texas and learned of Bess in a 1982 article in Texas Monthly, a longform profile by Michael Ennis that narrated a life of queer creativity in a place conducive to neither. There was a permission-giving power in this frank account of homosexuality and kink in a mainstream magazine, and Hawkins came to see Bess as a beacon or tether to the future he wanted for himself. “Whether consciously or not I gleaned from Ennis that art, discussions about art, and maybe even culture itself might one day be more open to the lives and works of misfits, autodidacts, perverts and rednecks like—if not Bess then—me.”

Alongside the paintings, Hawkins has included a collaged key to help decipher each abstraction, riffing on the idiosyncratic color theory that governed Bess’s work. Black in this formulation stands for inert potential, from which God made the universe; silver can be water (or sperm); yellow means piss/sulfur, green is rejuvenation. Hawkins’s Legend follows Bess’s lead in attempting to diagram the emanations of the unconscious: Bess’s letters include similar tables that annotate the personal lexicon of symbols that populate his paintings, over which he claimed to exert no control: “each [canvas] is a statement of what I don’t know,” he wrote to Betty Parsons, “I am only the conduit through which they pass.” Bess cast a wide net in his attempts to understand and interpret his work, and his charts synthesize deep reading of alchemy, mythology, Christian mysticism, and Carl Jung's theory of the collective unconscious, manifest in a set of primeval shapes that the mind somehow already knows.

Hawkins’s homages to Bess strike a balance between emulation and change, filtering the fundamentals through his own hand, taste, and extensive research. Bess originals are replicated, but never precisely, as Hawkins varies the palettes and flips orientations. His canvases also slightly shift Bess’s dimensions but retain their modest scale: “Most of Forrest Bess’s canvases rarely exceed a copy of LIFE magazine in size,” Hawkins notes—“miniscule next to the Persian rug size of most Ab Ex artists.” Bess’s cabinet pictures were ideally meant to be held in the hands, the better for viewers to engage and study them; Hawkins’s often fill the field of vision a bit more fully to hold gaze. The most evident sign of his intervention, though, is the appearance of ‘Dionysius’ on the surface of each painting: a misspelling of the Greek god Dionysus, lifted from one of Bess’s letters, and inscribed in a looping script reminiscent of Bess’s handwriting. The incursion of this element—extrinsic to the paintings—is a way of letting the research show, of extending Bess’s own lines of thought in directions he may not have fully pursued. Of the scrawled “Dionysius,” Hawkins says: “it’s in the work as a sign for the spirit guide that communicates between Bess and me. It might be his idealized super-self; it might be mine.”