In the nongendered torsos of painter Eileen Senner, the viewer senses a connection with very old imageries; the artist speaks of a visit to the Altamira cave in northern Spain, where her experience, as she puts it, allowed her "to experience firsthand extremely early images made by humans." Her art is tied to ancient philosophical questions, which ask about basic ideas and their physical existence, such as the nature of wisdom and where it resides - in the body or mind. Wisdom is an attribute of human culture that is hard is define, much like the numinous torsos Senner creates for our meditational benefit. The torsos, the result of much work in the form of many layers of painting and sanding, seem to hang in the air in a way that emphasizes their essential mysteriousness and unspoken communica- tion of spiritual values. Taken as a group, the torso paintings form a moving constellation of art that explores deeply considered queries about the nuances of wisdom; Senner sees the torso as "the portal through which all sorts of associations... memories and secrets slip and fall, emerge, enter, exit, repeatedly." The idea that the torsos allow an exchange of information is central to Senner's esthetic, which began with early sculptural drawings, which in turn evolved into animal compositions that gestured and interacted on wall surfaces.

What does it mean to be "embodied," to use a word important to Senner's esthetic? In the small panels (16 by 12 inches) involved, the artist refers reflexively, indeed obsessively, with an image that floats through the viewer's consciousness, just as it seems to hover against the dark back- ground against which it floats. According to Senner, the ongoing thread is "the body, its potential for wisdom." For an artist such as Senner, the mystery resides in the image itself, its ability to communicate values religious in their intensity but not belonging to a particular creed. All the works are quietly beautiful, and in one particularly successful work (all the pieces are unfilled), Senner shows us a rich reddish-brown torso, over which she has painted antlers in a darker brown. In a piece like this, the viewer begins to think of indigenous cultures, whose wisdom literatures emphasize the spiritual, even the practical when compared with the abstract symbolism of Western religious thought. Mystery emanates from this unusual painting, its beauty not a compromise but rather a triumph of intuitive, unspoken knowledge. Nearly abstract in its overall form, the work convinces us as much by what it does not say than by what it asserts.

The floating torsos, clouds of unknowing, pass by the viewer, who seeks to define their emanation and power. The bodies range in color from light tan to dark brown; in one there will be light striations that cover the larger form, and in another there will be a series of freckle-like brown spots that delicately decorate a tan and bluish-gray expanse of flesh. As objects of contempla- tion, they seem to hide as much as reveal. In an artist's statement, Senner is clear: "My intent is that the completed painting remain a query rather than a solution or an answer." The process of empathy, the act of imagining the other in all the figure's complexity, is central to Senner's esthetic. As a result, her spiritual quest is, as has been said, embodied in the series, which open up questions of spiritual responsibility in the face of what is not yet understood or declared. The torsos are magical calls to speculation; they are meant to provoke intuition as a language of memory, even nostalgia. As such, they put a claim on the audience's imagination, which seeks to apprehend and understand their ambiguous but pointed call to the viewer.

Jonathan Goodman is an editor and writer based in New York. He writes for several publications, including Art in America, Art on Paper, Sculpyure, and Art Asia Pacific.