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[Art reviews]

On and off the Street
A warm February on Newbury, and elsewhere

BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS

Punxsutawney Phil has it easy. Once he stirs from his heated bed, cameras flash, television lights glare, and audiences celebrate his prognosticating. Maybe Newbury Street’s art galleries should invest in some somnolent rodents — the crowds may be thin in the dead of winter, but the art’s not hibernating.

At Gallery NAGA, Yitzhak Elyashiv’s new prints and Stuart Ober’s new paintings evince a seasonless vigor. Elyashiv’s monoprints — all abstract, all muted in tone, and more or less all variations on one compositional theme — succeed where you’d least expect them to: they’re interesting. Even though most of the works resemble a hybrid of wind chimes and chili peppers — sprays of elliptical shapes at the ends of sinewy strings — their patterns read as deliberate as fingerprints or star formations or census maps. (The one work that doesn’t fit the mold nevertheless sports an array of gold dots on a sky-blue background.) In fact, it’s the unexpected naturalness of these populous forms in combination with the botanical comfort of their colors that makes these frames feel as if you were meeting a first cousin for the first time as an adult. The strangeness isn’t about their being bizarre but about their being unfamiliar.

Gallery NAGA is one of those increasingly rare places on the planet where two shows can co-exist without needing to have anything more in common than quality. Anywhere else, the pairing of Elyashiv’s high-tech tentacles with realist Stuart Ober’s light-drenched depictions of furniture (with attitudes) would earn some depressingly clever show title like “Tendrils to Tabletops” or “High C(HAIR)S.” Here, Ober’s powerful, peculiar work is allowed to stand and tumble on its own. He paints tables and chairs, plant stands and television sets, in a way that makes each frame register as if Hannibal Lecter were the interior decorator. For one thing, he’s figured out how to hold his viewers’ attention: he lops off the top part of each image, with the result that every painting makes you feel as if you were looking into his rooms from a weird perspective. In Yellow Chair on Table, the mouse’s view from a hole in a baseboard makes an otherwise unremarkable piece of furniture appear monolithic. In Table Space, the peeping-tom’s view from the transom on the other side of a nearby door creates a vertiginous effect. These meticulous distortions are simultaneously reassuring and disorienting: you get to see everything at the same time that you’re dramatically aware of what you’re being denied.

No less dramatic or insistent is Ober’s use of color. It’s viral. Viscous blue paint drenches the floor and furniture of one room; sunlight of the order that sets melanoma metastasizing falls beside an arts-and-crafts plant stand in another. Yellow dominates these frames (I remember each painting as large, but they’re actually diminutive), ranging from a thin honey amber on a mantle lined with asparagus to a rich pollen-yellow of one of the chairs. The color feels alternately nourishing and sickening, but it’s always, like the totality of Ober’s art, compelling. Although the show comes down on Feburary 24, NAGA represents both artists, and so their work can be seen on request.

LIGHT (one wants to say of a different kind) plays a central role in Jim Stroud’s careful, intelligent work at the Barbara Krakow Gallery. Stroud is among Boston’s most accomplished printers, and his creations draw on his printmaker’s sense of exactitude, precision, and design. Polished grids of meticulously woven colors appear in balanced horizontal and vertical groups; the small luminous squares at their centers look gently radiant. The interlocking patterns of pinks and greens, golds and purples, resemble elegant woolen tartans.

Yet though the execution of this exquisite work is impeccable, its ambition remains limited. I’m reminded of W.H. Auden’s late poems — technique supersedes content, intelligence dwarfs passion. I left these immensely smart confections not moved so much as impressed. In his earlier work, his alphabets and his black-and-gray grids, Stroud’s austerity felt vaguely confrontational, as if you were being insulted in a foreign language. In the current show, even that slight edge has been smoothed over for something uncomfortably decorative. If the false calm of “Linear Strategies” is Prozac-induced, let’s hope the artist loses his prescription.

THE DELIGHTS of the mixed show at the Howard Yezerski Gallery can be attributed to a calculated disavowal of calm. The photographs are what I remember; the paintings I’ve already forgotten. What’s remarkable is that the painters allow their dullness to shine so brightly, as it were. The paintings read like caricatures of modern art. Each square work is essentially a swath of a single color; they contribute (and are paced accordingly) to the exhibit as kind of eyewash, a cleansing of the visual palette.

The photographs, all variations on the notion of portraiture, are sensual and abstract, cerebral and soulful. John Coplans’s giant black-and-white image looks like a close-up of an elephant’s foot. Gradually I realized that the leathery, hairless, elephantine shape seemed familiar, that I’d been tricked into seeing beast where in fact there was the heel of an old man. Coplans’s generosity, his unflinching embrace of the human condition, begins with his own weathered skin. His foot, for all that it inspires a double take, does not read as a trompe d’oeil — he’s interested not in fooling us but in getting us to accept and even celebrate our animal nature, our bodies.

A similar spirit, both giving and humorous, is at work in Gary Schneider’s Retina, which takes the notion of self-revelation a step or two farther. Placed along one a wall at the gallery’s far end, Retina — whose title of course you don’t know at first — looks like an abstraction, multimedia maybe, with its network of venous squiggles emanating from two asymmetrical disks. Then we learn what it’s called; the squiggles aren’t venous, they’re veins, and those asymmetrical disks are the artist’s own eyes. Retina is delivered as a diptych, bilaterally symmetrical frames corresponding with the right and left eyes. The two halves work together like reverse binoculars. Not since Luis Buñuel has an artist so radically redefined “insight.” Also included at the Yezerski is a tender and wry triptych by Carrie Maw Weems, a more architectural piece by Lynne Cohen, and a powerful photo by Peter Hujar.

BEFORE THE MONTH is out and we trade in our groundhogs for lions and lambs, check out Chris Komater’s photographs at the Bernard Toale Gallery. Komater takes pictures of body parts of men — and not just any men or any body parts. He arranges hirsute fractions of middle-aged guys’ bodies and creates disarming grids. From a distance, the repeating images form mosaics that look like flowers; up close, the constituent petals turn out to be backs and behinds and armpits. Like Schneider and Coplans, Komater sets up a sharp dissonance between attraction and repulsion. Out of that dissonance comes a reluctant admission of beauty.