The work in Henry Art Gallery's new exhibit, "Videowatercolors: Carel Balth among His Contemporaries," is so beguiling that visitors may at first be too immersed in viewing pleasure to ask: Who is Carel Balth? And what the heck is a "videowatercolor"?

Balth is a Dutch artist born in Rotterdam in 1939, getting his first solo show in the U.S. with this retrospective. As for "videowatercolors," they are (in the words of exhibit-curator Marek Wieczorek, an associate professor of art history at the University of Washington) a means by which ordinary sights become extraordinary, thanks to Balth's wizardly handling of space, time and vantage point.

Balth's videowatercolors — almost all of them inkjet prints on canvas — are drawn from digital films he makes as he travels the world. His subject matter can range from an empty train seat to an airplane-porthole vista, from a rain-drenched flowering shrub to a fog-enshrouded high-rise.

On his computer, he then grabs stills from the digital videos, assembling them into two-, three-, four-, six- or eight-part images that push his humble subject matter into the realm of the abstract — or into visions of a "reality" that never existed.

Take "Skyscape (Blue Horizon)," which appears to be a view of a flat desert landscape as seen from an airliner. It's actually two "widescreen" images of nothing but sky, placed one above the other. Both come from a digital video that Balth shot, lens pressed against the ice-crystal-covered porthole, while flying over Spain.

In the top image, the sky is blue with wisps of cirrus clouds. In the bottom image, the same sky, filmed 20 minutes later, has turned to orange-tinged cloud cover as a storm approaches. Both shots include no landmass. Yet when juxtaposed, they produce such a strong landscape-like effect that you have to strain to see any "sky" in the bottom image.

"Moving II" plays an optical trick of a similar kind. At first glimpse, it appears to be a close-up of water lapping at the base of a cliff. But when you lean to the left, you can see the "cliff" is actually more waves turned on their side. Balth's extraction of four images from a digital video of ocean waves creates a fantasy seascape in four quadrants.

In "Time Shift IV" a single high-rise, with its upper reaches fading into fog, becomes a whole disorienting skyline where buildings dissolve, tilt or are sliced by an abrupt "edit" in the image. "Moving IV" is a simpler, more serene and sensual affair. It appears at first to be as abstract as any dark-hued Rothko canvas. But when you're told what it is — two shots of an empty train-seat, one stacked above the other — the compound image speaks poignantly of vanished human presences. Indeed, most of Balth's videowatercolors, with their focus on passing time and transient lighting effects, are a study in the ephemeral.

Balth isn't averse to including human beings in his work. But they do come as a surprise when they turn up. In "Reflections," they're dim figures in apparent motion seen through the plastic-sheet filter of a construction-site fence. In "Light Dance I," "Light Dance II" and "Light Dance III," which work as a single super-wide triptych, they're costumed performers, partially glimpsed among an abstract verve of horizontal shapes: spotlight, stage-curtain, shadows.

In every case, Balth strikes a fine balance between the playful and sublime. The results can be extraordinarily beautiful. But when he was in town last month for the show's opening, Balth insisted that any aesthetic pleasure his work yields is an accident.

"I'm not after a beautiful image," he declared. His aim, instead, is "to come to the heart of seeing, the core of perception."

Just as beauty for beauty's sake is not his point, neither is "composition." In each videowatercolor between two and eight images are chosen from thousands of possibilities in a given digital-video sequence. Composition is simply what happens when he puts his grabs together, often with unanticipated effects (such as that "cliff" in "Moving II").

Balth say he's working toward "a new abstraction," while admitting that "it's a challenge to work with reality and come to something near to abstract. ... It may not be achievable, but that makes it all the more interesting to try to work out."

Curator Wieczorek is eloquent on why Balth's term "videowatercolor" is so apt: "The word invokes the blending of two mediums not normally associated with each other — one relatively new, high-tech, and viewed on pixelated screens, the other as old as art, poetically intimate, and horizontally oriented because of the flow of pigmented water. In these works Balth [is] drawing analogies between the constant flow of pixels that constitute video's image capture and the fluid gestures that compose a watercolor."

Balth's "Videowatercolors" series didn't come out of nowhere. The Henry exhibit includes generous helpings from earlier series, "The New Collages" (1979-82), "Polaroid Paintings" (1982-86), "Laser Paintings" (1986-1996) and "Vinyls" (1997-1999), that feel like a seismic buildup to the explosions of invention and perception that mark the "Videowatercolors" series.

One of the "Vinyls" is particularly revealing not just of his method but of the way his mind works. In "The Three Graces (Plus II)," three clusters of transparent beads on red string are magnified to a point where they're unrecognizably rife with Rorschach-like suggestion. Balth himself sees something anatomical in the bloodlike string circulating within the pale bead-shapes.

Wieczorek has also made selections from the Henry's permanent collection to help place Balth in an international context. The artists range from Andy Warhol, with his fondness for repeated images, to Gerhard Richter, blending photography and oil painting in his work. Israeli-born British artist Ori Gersht's contribution, "Concrete City Scans: Stardust," seems especially pertinent, with its infinitely repeated apartment windows, suggesting a rectangular honeycomb, and its palm-tree-lined street-scene below.

If Balth has kindred spirits on the contemporary Dutch art scene, Wieczorek hasn't pointed them out. But he does remark on Balth's Dutch sense of light and natural observation (the manipulated garden scenes of two videowatercolors, "Still Life" and "Transvision V," are examples). I'd also note Balth's unusual feel for water. Even when he's not shooting in the Netherlands, Balth's eye is drawn to teeming water surfaces that seem about to overflow their bounds, the way canal waters sometimes appear to do in Holland.

And then there's Dutch humor. Two small videowatercolors, titled "Cycle I" and "Cycle II," are eight-image excerpts from digital videos he made while bicycling through his garden, camera pointed at the ground. They're a blurry, hectic, wobbly hoot.

"All my work is about playing in a philosophical or artistic way," Balth admitted on his visit. "For me, it's a very serious play — but still play."

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com