A couple of years ago I read Albert Camus’ beautifully spare, existentialist novel The Plague. I was pleasantly surprised at how easily understandable and enjoyable the book turned out to be-l had expected Camus to indulge himself in depthy philosophical rambles. On the contrary, he allowed his characters to perform the drama with very little analysis, and allowed his readers to pick up the philosophy on their own.

The Plague is about a doctor who finds himself quarantined in a small Algerian town as the Black Death ravages the population. The doctor’s actions are compassionate; he battles the disease long and hard, but his thoughts are cool and detached. He does not cry out in anger against the escalating tragedy. He does not weep. He remains a disengaged onlooker. The Plague, though it was written some fifty years ago, couldn’t be more vividly of-the-moment. Every page of the book equates somehow with the AIDS epidemic. By and large, those of us who are blessedly unafflicted must face the current plague on a daily basis with the same chilly remoteness of Camus’ doctor. We have to drive our cars, feed our children, and sleep at night without being consumed and incapacitated by passion. We are Londoners during the Blitz, and we have to carry on.

What we must not do however, is to allow ourselves to become so enured to the tragedy that we no longer feel the horror around us. At times we have to uncover our hearts to the stealthy demon in our midst.

Artist Chuck Crosby died on July 15th from AIDS-related complications. He was my age. He wanted, I’m sure, to make more art. He wanted to expand his skills and see his style mature. He wanted to whiff the tar and ammonia scent of acrylic paint, to watch new colors come to life on his palette, and sip another glass of cheap wine at still another opening night. And instead, he’s dead.

A suite of Crosby’s last paintings will be on display at Arthur Roger Gallery on Julia Street from September 10-28. Crosby saw himself as a naive artist- that is, he saw himself as an unsophisticated, untrained artist. I disagree. There is a difference between uneducated and self-educated. Certainly Crosby had studied the work of cartoon artists like Chicagoan Jim Nutt and New Yorker Keith Haring. Certainly Crosby understood the populist art philosophy of painters from Grant Wood to Kenny Scharf.

Like those guys, Crosby believed that everybody ought to be able to understand art, that you shouldn’t need a Yale MFA to get the picture. ‘And Crosby did not accept that there were

improper or undignified forms of an. He believed that it was cool for artists to do anything from studio canvases to one-of-a-kind T-shirts, from painting murals in front of an audience at the CAC to decorating the pianos at the Cat’s Meow on Bourbon street.’ Crosby wanted his art to reach everybody. Given time, it might have.

His best work, in my opinion, was a series of black-and-white, surreal landscapes he did a few years back. These quiet, other-worldly images spoke to me in the voice of Rod Serling, of lone-ly, colorless dreams, of Triassic prehistory, and loss. They are the polar companions of his more joyous and frenetic work. They are loudly mute visions, memories unrecalled, mirrors without reflection.

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Oil paint is made of pigment (ground minerals, burned bone, or synthetic dyes), linseed oil, and a little turpentine. That’s all it is. Randy Asprodites takes this banal material and attempts to make magic, to call psychological conditions into being, to give form to the invisible.

Asprodites says, “Yes, the first thing, the most important thing for me is to take this matter, this goo, and make it into something, something people can react to. It’s alchemy.”

Asprodites’ paintings are gentle, brushy visions of simple, compelling symbols of his own invention. In one piece an amber-colored cross has sprouted a serpent’s scales or bird’s feathers. In another, a string of emeralds stand atop one another as a vague geometric totem. In still another, a triangular grouping of orbs brings to mind every-thing from the weird precision with which insects lay their eggs to a rack of billiard balls. Each simple shape implies one thing, then a moment later implies another.

‘”That’s the point,” asserts the artist. “I want these pieces to mean something different to different people.”

Asprodites relies on the power of primal, universal symbols, the notion that certain shapes are so deeply embedded in our psyches that their meanings are passed along in our genes just like eye color-the Jungian thing. A cross, for example, may subconsciously imply uniqueness-two straight lines only cross once–or the meeting of unreconcilable elements.

But Asprodites also relies on the myriad conscious associations onlookers bring to simple shapes. A cross may suggest uniqueness and reconciliation on some level, but it is also a traffic intersection, a Roman torture device, a human torso with outstretched arms, etc. Asprodites welcomes all associations.

Anyone who’s taken design 101 can tell you not to place your .focal point smack-dab in the middle of your composition-the eye is unable to travel around the canvas, and remains stalled. Yet in painting after painting, Asprodites violates that “rule,” as well as “rules” against symmetrical shapes and uniformity of value and intensity. And he knows it.

“Look,”he says, “these shapes are at my center. They come right out of my belly, and I want them right in the center of my paintings. I know all the tricks. I’m just not interested. I’m not trying to be cute.”

It’s true. Asprodites is not trying to beguile anyone with his technique. Asprodites is throwing nothing but heat, fastballs down the middle, take it or leave it. His exhibition at Simonne-Stern from September 10-28 includes some wonderful new stuff. Whale is a sooty, inky, liquid evocation of a subconscious leviathan-a snapshot ‘of Captain Ahab’s nightmare obsession. La Cage might be a female torso, an hourglass, or a dice cage-potential entrapments all. And finally, check out The Birth of the Clawed Cloud, a vigorous, scratchy reinvestigation of the figments in the cumuli, God’s Rorschach test. •