Power and beauty reign at Ivy Associates, the new gallery in Schuylerville. However, it is the power of the art of Benno Kollegger that you should go out of your way to experience. It is the kind of art you encounter only in museums. The artists of the upper Hudson, whatever their quality, and some of it is very fine, want to make nice charming landscapes mostly, the kind of scenes you want to escape to on the wall above your couch. Kollegger, in examples from his Ten Commandment series, makes power, using the human form as his device. He is not new at this before him there was Michelangelo, Rubens and Rodin, but not too many others. Each bent the human form to his will and to his emotions in his own way: Kollegger’s art is utterly original in its effect. In “Three,” a muscular male nude pounds with a hammer with explosive force, carving his own body out of ice. In “I’m Above,” a mass of human flesh is jammed together, a coincidental recall of that most extraordinary example of found art in our time, the photographs from the prison at Abu Ghraib. In “Fourth” a giant multiple hand of God, with eight fingers like the legs of a great spider, extrudes a descending human form of semi-liquid ectoplasm. These figures are naked, and we are reminded of how strange clothing is, in its effort to hide behind a curtain, the agony and the ecstasy of the human condition. Clothing is only the top layer of many layered humanity. The skin itself is only a second layer, almost as superficial in what it can tell us. The real core lies beyond in the three-dimensional inner human which Kollegger exposes. Beyond the skin lie the sculptural masses of the inner body, the muscles and organs; in the body positions are expressed the infinite spaces of the mind. This is the true humanity Leonardo da Vinci first revealed in his art. Leonardo explained how it works. He observed that the movements of the mind, which includes the emotions, reveals itself in the movements of the flesh. However, these movements of the flesh are normally too subtle to be read, so Kollegger, like Michelangelo and Rodin, manipulates the body parts, paints and compositions, to express that inner emotion and, at the same time, to provoke an emotional response in the observer. Kollegger moves more than the figures in his paintings. He moves ourselves as well. Of course the message in these paintings has to do with the human condition — this art revels in it, in its dark side, which all our efforts fail to keep out of sight. Gray backgrounds, unadorned except for large abstract shapes, play a similar role as do these colors and shapes in Picasso’s Guernica. Richly changing color tones and brushwork in the portrayal of human flesh, make that flesh both vivid and translucent. Rather than abstracting it, the paint work exalts flesh, exalts its reality, literally slamming it at us with disconcerting force. But then step back a moment, breathe, and see how beautiful it is after all, how the paint work shimmers, how the picture surface is a strong design which reaches out to our aesthetic sense. Thus artists, true artists, use art not only to enhance the expression of their forms, but also to provide a pure kind of pleasure which mediates between the image and ourselves. In emotionally charged art, it is what makes the catharsis work.