On the afternoon of July 9, 1975, the 33-year-old Dutch-born conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader set sail from Cape Cod on a solitary voyage across the Atlantic on a 12-foot boat. Intended as the first part of a three-act performance piece called In Search of the Miraculous, the journey was never completed; three weeks after his departure, radio contact with the boat was lost, and Ader was never seen again.

Since his death, many critics have seen in his work this exact merging of the romantic and the tragic, which defined his short life. Enshrining his contained oeuvre — a few short films (most shot over a single weekend) and related photographs — with an almost saintly status, his death has often overshadowed the attention paid to his actual works, whose ambivalence and economy of expression is best experienced first-hand. This has now been made possible by Simon Lee’s brilliantly arranged exhibition, including rare 16mm screening of Ader’s ‘fall’ films: Fall I; Fall II; Broken Fall (Geometric); Broken Fall (Organic) and Nightfall (all composed between 1970-71), as well as his most well-known I’m too sad to tell you (1971), showing Ader crying inconsolably for ten minutes.

His austere cinematographic visual style, bringing to mind Dreyer and Bresson, is offset by tactics of slowness and silence, by being so vulnerable and so calculated at the same time. His Broken Fall diptych reveals a similar contradiction. The ‘geometric’ film sees him staggering next to a black sawhorse, on a brick path leading to the Westkapelle lighthouse in Zeeland (the subject of an early series of Ader’s artistic Dutch forefather, Mondrian) before falling sideways against the sawhorse and into the bushes, wind rustling indifferently through the reeds around him. In the ‘organic’ one, he is swinging from a tree branch, entirely conditioned by gravity, before finally falling into a river below. Whereas the first fall has to be decided upon and permitted, the second is only a matter of duration and stamina. What constitutes the ingenuity of Ader’s work is drawing attention to the fact that occupying these two positions is not so different; the ending is inevitably the same.

Never falling into a system of heavy-handed symbolism, Ader's work is underpinned by a lightness, whose clarity and transparency anchors, rather than eradicates, its seriousness. Its almost slapstick quality is fuelled by something deeper, a seductiveness of losing of control, of allowing yourself — by sheer will or determinism — to be swayed.

Bas Jan Ader is at Simon Lee at 12 Berkeley Street London W1J 8DT, from 24 June to 28 August 2016.

The exhibition is presented in association with The Estate of Bas Jan Ader / Mary Sue Ader Andersen and Meliksetian | Briggs, Los Angeles.