The moment I learned that the " Accumulation " show at the Clifford•Smith Gallery would be bringing together artists whose work relies on the performance of compulsively repetitive acts in the service of their Muse, I felt excited, but also scooped. For some time now, I had been aware of an emerging theme among a segment of otherwise diverse artists, namely the articulation of style as a function of almost endless, almost identical gestures. Apparently I wasn’t alone in figuring that out.

" Accumulation " is one of those rare gems in which the organizing momentum grows from the nature of the work artists are actually doing rather than a curator’s clever or not so clever idea. The assembly of 20 or so pieces by nine artists representing two hemispheres and three continents enjoys the luminous charge of real discovery. It’s the kind of show that wants to change the way we understand art. That it also serves a common theme is a bonus.

I’m not sure I’d have called it " Accumulation, " however. The word connotes accretion, density, even clutter, whereas every painting, drawing, and sculpture here feels pared to its essence. These objects resonate not only as enchanting but also as true — for their purposefulness, their intensity, their exactitude. And in Jennifer Maestre’s case, for their hilarity.

Maestre’s is the only sculpture in the show, and for all her droll refinement — eggs shot through with finishing nails until they resemble sea urchins; a rippling, vase-sized vessel made from hundreds of sharpened #2 pencil tips — her contribution proves curiously sensual, as if she were celebrating not touch so much as its prohibition.

At a distance, these sculptures look feathery and gentle, like mutant mimosa blossoms. On closer examination, the lightness gives way to an unexpected strength and complexity. In the gallery’s small inner room, a zipper runs half way up a Maestre construction. It looks like a cozy, but for what? An upright rolling pin? The cozy turns out to be made of sheet-metal nails. The tightly arranged points of the nails form the exterior. The open zipper reveals a chain mail composed of the nails’ heads. The exterior comes across as simultaneously inviting and uninviting; the seeming smoothness of the surface is all illusion. Touch the ethereal outside and you bleed.

Maestre, daughter of dada and mediæval armor, plays the appearance of softness against the reality of sharpness, but her ambitions go beyond mere irony or incongruity. Her sculpture stands up as a dramatic incarnation of one of the nagging contradictions of the human condition: the way we mistake the difficult for the easy, the approachable for the repellent. With skill and unimaginable patience, she pulls us close to her modestly sized creations only to forbid our contact; she compels us to confront our attraction to these exquisite instruments of harm.

At the other end of the spectrum, in ambient and material terms, lie Marco Maggi’s three tiny works (none is much bigger than an index card). These are small squares of aluminum foil on whose underside Maggi has drawn or embossed abstract patterns of miniaturized grace. If Maestre’s work draws us in only to turn us away, Maggi seems to want to pull us right through the glass of his frames. The diminutive scale combines with the highly reflective silver surface and a tumult of forms to make you press closer and closer to get a look. But even then the work is hard to see, since with the slightest shift in perspective, the reflective foil blinds you to one part of the intaglio while another comes into view.

The barely raised network of the shapes themselves (nothing Maggi does is much thicker than a fingernail) hover between familiar and strange. Sometimes they resemble the flattened topography of a model city as one form connects to another with a sense of both mystery and purpose. What’s especially remarkable is the works’ ability to imply a narrative; since multiple shapes repeat at various angles, they read like fragments of a wispy bas relief, hieroglyphs of an unknown culture.

Gerhard Mayer does ink drawings on paper that look computer-generated (they’re not): mathematically precise, balanced yet random, handsome and unknowable. A grid of his drawings occupies part of a wall at the Clifford•Smith, and to see them is to feel you’ve stumbled on a catacomb — they suggest forbidden, religious, clandestine events. Untitled (191) could be a rendering of human abdominal muscles on display in an anatomy class — ripples of organically connected forms appear removed from the larger body to which they originally belonged. Yet you don’t get the feeling of evisceration so much as the sense that you’re beholding a stolen beauty.

The most colorful work in " Accumulation " belongs to Christopher Broughton, whose method of transferring oil paint to canvas involves the repeated application of paint-drenched strings. The resulting accumulation of lines makes it seem you’re looking through a fine mesh fence at some deeper, differently colored objects. In Build/Bury/Red/Blue those objects appear to be blue sails, as if boats were gliding beneath an orange net. As you might expect, applying wet strings to canvas becomes a marriage of evenness and irregularity; the strings are held taut, and that make the lines straight, but the paint itself is never perfectly distributed. Consequently, as with so much in the show, a tension arises between the deliberate and the uncontrolled.

It was explained to me how Taney Roniger creates her works of iridescent stainless-steel paint on panels patterned with nail punctures, but even as I listened, I knew it was beyond me — the script was that hermetic, detailed, and involved. What isn’t beyond any of us is the effect she achieves, a weighty restfulness that’s like looking up into a cloudless night sky. For all the darkness of her imagery — the color ranges from dark gray to pitch black — these meticulous yet playful abstractions feel light, perhaps even reassuring. If darkness can be so consciously perforated, maybe there’s nothing to be afraid of.

Tara Donovan’s huge ballpoint-pen drawing (unframed, it measures in at almost six by five feet) stands out in the show not only for its size and grandeur but for its compelling evocation of organic matter. A few days before, on a walk, I’d seen an exposed tree trunk that had erupted in a fan of tree-ear mushrooms. Donovan’s interlocking curlicues brought them to mind, with the difference that I left her creation with the impression that she never lifts the pen from the paper. Miles of little circles all connect; if her composition were made of string instead of ink, one tug would see it all come apart.

Other fine work in the show includes the grids of minuscule droplets by Teo Gonzalez, which read like color charts without color, or methodical examinations of acid rain. Lee Etheredge creates flowing, abstract, feather-like patterns in ink on small pieces of Japanese paper. On examination, the patterns turn out to be made of thousands of letters pressed by hand from the keys of an old typewriter. And there’s The Droner, a deft sheet-rock/acrylic/ink confection by Jeff Konigsberg.

IF " ACCUMULATION " CELEBRATES what artists can accomplish when they refuse to take their meds, then Fred Tomaselli’s solo exhibit " Editions " at the Bernard Toale Gallery, two floors down from the Clifford•Smith, celebrates the opposite. Tomaselli appears to be painting what he’s been prescribed.

The best work in this uneven exhibit is the most kinetic and the most abstract, where the artist neither lectures nor illustrates. Metalectual x 80 is a vibrant, engaging mess of colorful necklaces of capsules and pills. It looks like a DNA riot. More stately but not a whole lot less riotous is 16 x 14 to a higher power, an etching almost three feet square that depicts row upon row of candy-colored tablets. It’s as if Tomaselli had merged a butterfly display with his medicine cabinet.

Less successful works are marked by didacticism, like 562 eyes in self-surveillance. Here a picture of a brain branches into a bilaterally symmetrical web of neurons; on the tip of each neuron’s branch lie 562 eyes.