JUST BETWEEN YOU AND EYE : ARTIST ELLSWORTH KELLY'S COLORFUL GEOMETRIC CREATIONS ARE ALL ABOUT PERCEPTION.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

``Look,'' Ellsworth Kelly urges quietly. ``Try not to think. Just look.''

Hanging before him, on a wall at the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles, is Kelly's ``Yellow Black.'' A large composition, like most of the artist's work, the 1988 oil on canvas measures more than 13 feet across and 9 feet high.

Your eyes go first to the black rectangle, which appears to be piggy-backing on the much larger yellow square. Locked in diagonal tension, the two panels jockey for position.

Your gaze then slides from left to right: first black, then yellow, then the cool white neutrality of the wall itself. The effect produces a fleeting sensation of escape, of breaking loose from a visual logjam of color and form.

Kelly's voice returns.

``It's not the surface I want you to dwell on, it's the space between you and the color,'' he explains. ``People are programmed to find something in a painting that's either sexual or political, or a beautiful landscape, or `technique.' With our eyes open all day we see a million perceptions, and you think what you see instead of see what you see.''

Seeing is believing 

Seeing, for the 73-year-old Kelly, always has been more about experience than explanations. Abstract, oversized and effusively colorful, his pieces are more like living organisms than like windows on any type of internal or external reality.

Sometimes, his fire-engine-red curves and giant pumpkin-colored pie wedges look as if they're about to slide off the wall. Other times, their sheer size and compelling obviousness pushes them out toward our noses, crashing through our perceptual barriers and purging us of preconceptions.

Drawing inspiration from landscapes and other natural forms, Kelly's works demand elbow room. Whether executed in paint, wood, dime-store cloth or stainless steel, they're meant to be viewed from a thoughtful distance.

Thus, Kelly believes, they've found a good temporary home at MOCA, where ``Ellsworth Kelly: A Retrospective'' opens today and will be on view through May 18.

``My paintings are about vision and perception, they're not about presentation of ideas,'' says the artist, doing a quick walk-through of the show, which was organized over three years by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City and later will head to London's Tate Gallery, then to Munich, Germany.

Space, the final frontier

``The only way my works can be considered political, I suppose, is that my forms and colors need their own space. That's like us, I suppose. We don't want people crowding us. We want our own space. So, I think my paintings are about clarity and freedom.''

Alert to the point of wariness, yet gracious and pleasant, Kelly maintains a steady line of chatter as he escorts a visitor through the galleries. He wasn't always this way, he says. When he first started making art seriously, some 50 years ago, he cultivated an attitude as oblique as his paintings.

``I wanted to become rather impersonal,'' he says. ``I didn't want to reveal anything. And I found people got the wrong ideas.''

Or, in some cases, no ideas at all. Despite their geometric precision, Kelly's paintings and sculptures are difficult because they fall outside the realm of conventional interpretation. Monumentally mysterious, they engage each other in mute dialogue, leaving observers to question in silence.

Art and the man

Their maker is equally hard to classify.

He sort of belongs with the abstract expressionists, but not really.

He spent lots of time as a young American in Europe poring over Romanesque and Byzantine art, as well as modernist works by Picasso, Matisse, Max Beckmann and Jean Arp. But Kelly is hard to confuse with any of these.

You easily could mistake his deceptively simple shapes and supermarket-bright colors for a kind of pop art minimalism, but you'd probably be off-track.

The only word that clearly fits is originality.

``I think that Ellsworth is one of those artists who've eluded pigeonholing and labels over time,'' says Tracy Bashkoff, curatorial assistant and project manager for the Guggenheim show.

``I know it sounds kind of corny, but I've said to people who've walked through the exhibitions that I really see differently after spending (the last three years) with his work. That shadow between the curtain and the corner of (my) window looks slightly different to me now than it did.''

Kelly's career chronology, as laid out in the weighty exhibition catalog, indeed gives the impression of a man who refuses to march in any aesthetic parade. His life is a list of exotic travels, relentless achievements and stimulating company (artists Jasper Johns and Alexander Calder, musician and composer John Cage, to name a few of his friends).

But you'll search the catalog in vain for deep insights into the man and his emotional life. His art, of course, yields few clues, apart from such rarities as a 1982 portrait of Kelly's dying father. And he will concede that the two white curves in ``Rebound'' (1959) are ``a little bit sexy.''

Creative impulses

Wearing basic Manhattan gray-black - corduroy shirt, sport coat and slacks - the Upstate New York-born artist is the image of urbane inscrutability. But his manner is gentle as he guides his visitor past a sweeping blue-green triangle that suggests a slow-breaking wave.

Oh sure, he admits, his work is the type that still invites wry, baffled comments.

``I heard two guys (at the Guggenheim show) and one said to the other, `Oh, I could do that,' '' Kelly says.

He cocks a knowing eyebrow.

``And the other guy turned to him and said, `But did you?' ''

With that, the artist takes his leave to make ready for more interviews.

A few steps outside MOCA's doors, in a giant hole east of Grand Avenue, construction workers have begun to trace the outlines of a new building. Starkly visible against the dark topsoil are four huge, crisp white rectangles.

They could be prehistoric paintings, geometric puzzles or the sides of a man's torso. They could be none of the above.

Try not to think. Look.

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

PHOTO (1 -- color) ``It's not the surface I want you to dwell on, it's the space between you and the color,'' says artist Ellsworth Kelly of the works in his exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

(2 -- color) Pony (1959), left, is made of painted aluminum. Included in the exhibit are, clockwise from top right, ``Painting for a White Wall'' (1952), ``Blue Green Curve'' (1972) and ``Orange Red Relief'' (1990).

Phil McCarten/Daily News