Robert Irwin.

DIA CENTER FOR THE ARTS/PACEWlLDENSTEIN

Like a month in the country, Robert Irwin's scrim installations offer deeply seductive holidays from the tensions of social experience, and even from the challenges of everyday art-going. There is apparently message to decode, no irony to tolerate, no argument to wrestle; instead you are pacifically absorbed in the act of visual perception, caught up in a rhythmic passage through space. It is the Matissean idea of art as respite, the comfortable armchair - except you have to walk.

For an installation in two parts at Dia, Prologue: x 183 (April-June 1998) and Excursus: Homage to the square' (through June 1999), Irwin has divided one floor of the building into eighteen square cells walled in semitransparent scrim. Tempered natural light flows in through the scrim-covered windows in the building's north and south walls, and there are also vertical fluorescent tubes in each room - true the north and one on the south wall in Prologue, one on each wall in Excursus. Bands of gel around different parts of these tubes color their light. A kind of cloverleaf of open doorframes connects the rooms where the walls intersect; a room can have up to eight doors, two in each corner. Since all these doors align, they allow clear views through the installation, on axes both lateral and diagonal.

The scrim too allows vision into the next room, and on into the rooms. beyond - but dimly, and more so as the walls accumulate. Filtered through these veils, light seems layered and milkily textured. People in other chambers become differently distinct shadows; crossing in front of a door, even a distant one. they snap into clarity, then reatomize, a silent play casting everyone as both audience and actor. The space is mazelike yet its order is self-evident. The rows of fluorescent tubes, fading as they recede, mark the pacing of the walls. In Prologue, all of the fluorescents' gels were the same blue and gray, so that the light was consistent from room to room, though its intensity depended on the nearness of the windows. In Excursus, the gels change from room to room, so that the color of the air shifts with every doorway, while every wall is colored by the light behind it. The space is also darker - the gels screen out more light, and fall and winter cut the light from the windows.

A sampling of Irwin's older art, from before he began his scrim works, was view at PaceWildenstem - from the disks of the late '60s, which throw shadows that muddle the boundary between the artwork and its environment, back through the dot paintings, where color is an ambient haze, to the California versions of Abstract Expressionism from the late '50s. At one point Irwin was making paintings to sit in hand or lap, reducing their size and setting them in polished, boxlike frames. This was the materiality he escaped from in his later uses of air, light, and space.

Painting must have been on Irwin's mind at Dia, though, for the subtitle of Excursus comes from Josef Albers's "Homage to the square" series of geometric abstractions. (The installation's walls, too - cloth stretched on a wood frame - are perhaps the ghosts of a painting's canvas.) The different-colored areas of light in Excursus stress the floor's division into squares. Another division appears in a horizontal band of slight darkness, coincident with a band of get in the vertical fluorescents, midway up every wall. (This looks like a trick of the light, but irwin spray-painted the scrim: he also put a matching strip of gel on the windows.) In Prologue, on the other hand, a cloud of undifferentiated light seemed to fill the space, moderating the rigor of the grid. If Excursus cites Albers, Prologue was closer to Rothko and the way his blur-edged rectangles soften basically geometric structures and seem to fuse with the field around them.

Rothko's erosion of the boundary or edge, and the boundless space of his color, were among the qualities that back in 1961 moved Robert Rosenblum to apply to him the concept of the "abstract sublime?' And the idea of the sublime has also been applied to Irwin, by, for example, Rosalind Krauss, who sees him as discovering that "the sublime, the absolutely great, is what art opens onto when it opens up onto the world as perceived under certain optical conditions." ("This was a lesson that had great resonance in California," Krauss tartly adds.) Prologue achieved a feeling of boundlessness by gentling the strictness of its arrangement through its softness on the eyes. In many visitors it seemed to produce a calm alertness. The meditation traditions of Eastern religions provide analogues to this state, but although Irwin admits to having dabbled in Zen back when everyone did, he was startled when his disk works were compared to mandalas; his own accounts of his evolution tend to stress art history, philosophy, and other bracingly strenuous disciplines. Even so, his attempt to, in his words, "weave the richness of our perceptions . . . into the very fabric of our daily lives" may bring us as close to mystical experience as we are likely to get in our gallery rounds.

David Frankel is a contributing editor of Artforum. His interview with Kiki Smith, "In Her Own Words," appears in Helaine Posner's Kiki Smith (Bulfinch Press, 1998).