Few visitors to the Berkeley Art Museum will know the name Rudolf de Crignis. And probably too few will look at his monochrome paintings installed there carefully enough to discover the peculiar resistance they offer.

Canvases in various hues of blue and gray, plus some very low-definition drawings, sparsely fill the walls of two large galleries. The paintings' differences in size, hue and shape at first appear too trivial to merit sustained attention.

But something begins to happen for a viewer who actually stops to compare them.

After a few minutes similar canvases cease looking like versions of one another, or like exemplars of an unstated program, although de Crignis (1948-2006) did say "each painting I execute is part of a larger understanding."

Examine adjacent blue pieces and the word "blue" no longer seems adequate to describe either one. Paint manufacturers' color names add only a degree of precision.

Gradually, the paintings' individual reality begins to outweigh all the available words, leaving perception as the work's content.

Bear down on any single painting, and ambiguities generated by its layered color and seamless surface continue to intensify. You recognize that viewing distance and angle, gallery lighting and time of day all factor into what you see. Blatantly available at first, de Crignis' paintings seem to grow more elusive with time.

The process of scrutiny feels almost frighteningly endless, which seems to have been de Crignis' point: to create lenses on the measureless depth of the real-as-perceived.

The Swiss-born de Crignis worked in video and performance before he encountered the reductive paintings of artists such as Robert Ryman, Agnes Martin and Ad Reinhardt on a 1980 visit to New York.

Aided initially by a Swiss government stipend, he moved to New York in the mid-'80s and devoted himself to making paintings such as those presented at BAM.

The elegant de Crignis monograph - not a catalog per se - whose publication by Radius Books coincides with this exhibition has bound into it a sort of flip-book that documents the 30 layers of color underlying an ostensibly gray 2005 painting.

As I overheard my mind unavailingly throwing words at de Crignis' paintings, I thought of William Burroughs' lines in "The Ticket That Exploded": "Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting your sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word."

"Silence" not golden: De Crignis' show, because it so clearly invites us to empty ourselves, might have been subtitled "Silence," did that tag not belong to a concurrent exhibition at BAM.

Organized by the Menil Collection in Houston, "Silence" includes artworks that everyone ought to see by Giorgio de Chirico, Rene Magritte, Andy Warhol, Bruce Nauman, Doris Salcedo, Christian Marclay and others.

But the show and its catalog arrive noisy with overthinking.

Intended to mark the centennial of the birth of John Cage (1912-1992), whose 1961 book "Silence" magnified his influence far beyond his and everyone else's expectations, "Silence," the exhibition, gets snarled trying to sort silences by type and frame of reference.

Most paintings and sculpture being soundless by nature, instructive differences among, say, an early '60s black painting by Ad Reinhardt - BAM's own pristine example - a de Chirico dreamscape and a classic Magritte are hard to detect.

Cage mentioned Robert Rauschenberg's early white paintings as an inspiration for "4'33" " - the soundless piano piece whose performance makes his point that "there is no such thing as silence," only failures of attention. So the show's inclusion of a two-panel white Rauschenberg makes strong sense.

But Colombian Doris Salcedo's concrete-choked furniture, which mutely evokes paralysis of ordinary life by fear, and Joseph Beuys' "Das Schweigen (The Silence)" (1973), which activates memories of Ingmar Bergman's 1963 film, differ enough in spirit and creative tactics to split the exhibition's seams.

We tend to associate silence with clarity. The same cannot be said for "Silence."

Rudolf de Crignis: Paintings and drawings. Through May 5. Silence: Paintings, sculpture, video and sound works. Through April 28. Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way, Berkeley. (510) 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu.
