E-Mail This Article to a Friend Art meets art Natércia Caneira at Genovese/Sullivan BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS

In Yasmina Reza’s 1998 Tony-winning Art, a friendship is put to the test when the protagonist pays a huge sum of money for an all-white painting. However you understand the play’s major theme, there’s no getting around its central conflict: a good friend grows to regard the main character as terminally bourgeois and dishonest for shelling out $30,000 for a white oil painting on a white canvas.

Art set up, if only in short-lived, middle-class terms, a standard of reckoning: when the elements of a work are both few and stark, you’d better have a very good reason (besides being a well-heeled dentist) for spending the big bucks. I haven’t conducted any surveys, but I’d be willing to bet that the sale of uniform, monochromatic work fell off sharply after 1998 and that all-white work went into an even deeper freeze.

Enter Natércia Caneira. I don’t know how old she is — the press release simply says that she’s "young" — but I do know that she’s from Portugal. And somehow the combination — youth and likely distance from Broadway and the vicissitudes of the art establishment — means she was never inoculated against white. Thank God. In "The Limits of Softness" (if only the title weren’t suggestive of bathroom tissue and fabric softener!), at Genovese/Sullivan Gallery, she makes such inventive use of white material, you’ll probably remember it as color-soaked. Unlike the unseen artist of Art, Caneira does not paint. Neither does she sculpt, assemble, photograph, or, with one exception, draw. White, you could say, is both her color and her medium. "The Limits of Softness" comprises 11 works: two large fabric installations, one small drawing, and eight medium-sized wall-mounted squares of plastic-looking drafting film. It is a show that enjoys such command and awareness of its limits that it immediately transcends them.

For me, the most intriguing parts are the eight squares (one’s actually a two-by-three-foot rectangle; the other seven are three-foot squares) of almost translucent, pure white drafting film that the artist has manipulated with such gentle yet firm precision and forthrightness that, even though she’s dealing in visual whispers, what she’s whispering comes across like "Fire!" in a packed theater. Caneira’s drafting paper isn’t etched, scratched, sewn, incised or otherwise manipulated by standard mark making. Hers is an art so private and delicate that, like the whiteness of her surfaces, it courts disappearance. She folds. Each of her subtle, self-effacing wall-mounted expanses (unframed, they’re held down in the corners by almost headless pins) makes an impression that holds up as strong and as ephemeral as an exhalation of breath. The evidence of the artist’s presence is invariably muted — minute, fleeting, light. Yet that very quietude hints at the opposite, a palpable force. For a second, you’re looking at something entirely nondescript, a little ledge pressed from behind that extends across the bottom of a colorless white rectangle. For a while, it’s just a simple, folded piece of stately paper. Before long, though, the contrast between the stark whiteness of the drafting film and the shadow that the ledge creates makes the thin lip move in and out of focus. One moment, it looks solid enough to hold a mantel clock; the next, it’s hardly there at all.

Caneira may well be tapping into something Carl Jung might have called our collective architectural unconscious. Between the Light #6 is the one horizontal and raised work among the wall pieces, and for all its opacity and passivity, it insists on being regarded as a ghost shelf or a ghost ledge, a reminder of those places we lean against or prop things on. Her attention goes to the frame, so to speak, and not to the picture, to implied absences, to the chill air an overcoat delivers to a room from a walk in winter and not to the person beneath the garment. The exquisite articulateness of her wall mountings combines with the fact that they almost don’t exist — it’s like a knot that disappears when both ends of a string are pulled — to create an unusual level of tension and interest.

In her square pieces, no such ledges protrude, nothing protrudes. Instead, small, occasional seams occur, mostly in horizontal formations. They resemble Braille or embossment or what a piano roll of a composition by John Cage might look like. Minimalists, no matter what the medium, know the tremendous resonance even the slightest gesture makes. In Caneira’s case, her knife-thin folds create almost imperceptible rises where the folds end, like the last stages of swelling around a suture. Is it any wonder, then, that when I was looking at Between the Light #7, the two sharp, identical slits as distant from each other as two nipples on a chest suddenly made me think of mastectomy?

"Natércia Caneira: The Limits of Softness"

At Genovese/Sullivan Gallery, 450 Harrison Avenue in Boston, through July 8.