PRESENTATION:Jordan Belson-The Cosmic View
Jordan Belson was a pioneering American avant-garde filmmaker and painter who fused abstract art with mysticism. A master of visual music, he created mesmerizing, meditative films using kaleidoscopic light, liquid dyes, and mirrors. Heavily influenced by Eastern philosophy, yoga, and astronomy. While Belson is best known for making films, he made a significant body of two-dimensional works and kinetic sculptures from the 1940s until his death in 2011. Like his films, his graphic art brings aesthetic, spiritual, and sensual experiences to the viewer, reflecting his deep interest in sacred art, cosmology and cosmogenesis.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Matthew Marks Gallery Archive
Now, timing perfectly with the centennial of his birth, Matthew Marks Gallery is bringing the artist’s intensely private studio practice to light. “Jordan Belson: The Cosmic View” opens across both Los Angeles gallery spaces staging an invaluable look at thirty-one works on paper and paintings created between 1950 and 1970—the vast majority of which have never been exhibited publicly until now.
To look at Belson’s fastidious compositions is to witness a profound convergence of rigorous science and esoteric mysticism. Before he became a master of “visual music” on film, Belson began his career purely as a painter, even exhibiting at SFMOMA and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in the late 1940s. When he turned his focus to single-frame animation in 1950, painting did not cease; instead, it became the private engine of his cosmic imagery.
Among the standout pieces in “The Cosmic View” are his early 1950s “Target” paintings. Rich with kaleidoscopic, concentric rings, these works pulsate with a structured, planetary energy. Belson did not see these forms as arbitrary abstractions, but rather as highly literal translations of natural laws. As the artist once observed:
“They parallel the motions in the cosmos where spheres are rotating around each other, and rotating themselves: the sun, the planets, everything is lined up and moving in circles.”
In the early 1950s, Belson’s explorations expanded past the cosmic down into the deeply subjective psychic landscapes unlocked by hallucinogens. For Belson, the canvas acted as a vessel for capturing truths from interior voyages. He rejected the “abstract” label, considering his art to be an exact, faithful record of altered psychic states—an attempt to “bring it back alive from the uncharted areas of the inner image, inner space.”
This mapping of the interior mind manifests brilliantly in specific series on display. His “Brain Drawings” (1952) reveal a fascinating mix of biological curiosity and transcendental intuition, tracing complex, neural pathways that look like spiritual maps. Similarly, his “Peacock Book” drawings from 1952 and 1953 use thick, concentrated ink and pastel lines to build infinite, dense forms that anchor the viewer’s gaze, operating much like traditional Eastern sacred art.
For those familiar with Belson’s cinematic masterpieces like “Caravan” (1952) and “Mandala” (1953), the exhibition offers an extraordinary look at his creative process through his scroll paintings. Prepared like cinematic film strips, Belson painted long, successive images onto these scrolls to execute his single-frame animations.
Seeing these scrolls static on a gallery wall reveals his absolute mastery over color and light. They depict eclipse-like movements of celestial bodies floating through brilliant, alien colorscapes, proving Belson’s assertion that he did all of his thinking in images.
This landmark exhibition reminds us that Belson’s true legacy was bridging the gap between the tangible and intangible. He successfully constructed real events in an entirely unreal world, creating containers of wisdom meant to teach us about a knowledge that lies entirely beyond words.
Photo: Jordan Belson, Target c. 1953, Casein on panel, 15 × 15 inches; 38 × 38 cm, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery
Info Matthew Marks Gallery, 1062 North Orange Grove & 7818 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 27/6-15/8/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://matthewmarks.com/
