“Behemoth” is a word that does not set out to describe light, frivolous, or pretty pictures. Behemoth is monstrous, oppressively heavy, and mysterious, a powerful and gigantic beast. In scale alone, Donnabelle Casis’ new works in oil at Howard House are, in a word, behemoth. The forms, in their awkward dance with the field of the picture plane, feel heavy in terms of bulk and heavy in terms of psychological and emotional resonance. This is the beast laid bare, the raw innards of the monster.

DONNABELLE CASIS: BEHEMOTH

Howard House ends October 21

With a flair and emotion all her own, Casis wraps a tentacle around a multitude of influences. Six monumental works in vibrant blues, yellows, and pinks dwarf the gallery space at Howard House. Expressive lines that seem to spring from the inner reaches of the artist’s psyche follow in the path of Arshile Gorky’s figurative abstraction, straddling surrealism and abstract expressionism and employing a free-form, automatic drawing technique that exposes the unconscious. Like Gorky, Casis displays an aesthetic vocabulary inhabited by ghastly, anthropomorphic forms, forms that require dissemination and that are beautiful in their violence and energy.

Rather than observing the outside world from within, Casis takes introspection to an intensely physical level. She has crafted landscapes, sonic booms, genetic manipulations that float free and burst forth from the canvas. Intestinal flurries twist and splay. Whirling masses explode and undulate. Explosive pink, ࠬa Philip Guston’s strangely awkward paintings, suggests flesh and blood without being fully figurative. Like Rorschach ink blots, we’re left to find meaning for ourselves.

Casis crafts beautiful abstractions while at the same time presenting raw visions of utterly earthly things. Entrails? Phalli? Orifices and folds of flesh or sinew? But a tension exists between what is organic and what is synthetic; pink refers to flesh but also to bubble gum or plastic. One can also discern pastries or cakes frosted in pink confection. The levels of perception and understanding are boundless. And Casis says that she is reacting to fashion, to Hollywood’s glitz, to Jennifer Lopez’s Versace dress. She examines the patterns of men’s ties, posing unresolved questions about beauty, the absurdities of adornment, and the formal elements of color and proportion that are at once arbitrary and drilled into the aesthetic sensibilities of the quotidian.

Here is honesty in the raw, and an utter lack of that ubiquitous and ill-directed tendency to avoid confrontation. Shocking in their forwardness, Casis’ works are the most personal that the artist has presented to date. The ugliness of these twisting, pulsating organs, these flabby, choked intestines, remains alluring. The result is almost beautiful. Carving forms out of thick paint, pushing color choices to their extremes, she’s not afraid to paint what is ugly, disturbing, and in-your-face, and the resulting paintings are unflaggingly appealing.