Looking for the light (continued)

Escape and redemption play themselves out somewhat differently in a small (about six inches square), unattributed print immediately to your left as you enter the show. The Madonna levitates above desperately rowing men who fight a similarly threatening sea. One of the crew appears to be praying. And whereas Saavedra’s homage to the boat people reads as purely ingenuous, this work boasts a bar code that also hovers in the air above the sailors, as if to say that even redemption can be scanned and commodified.

Yet another religious seascape, Ricardo Silveira Miro’s Virgen nacional, orchestrates the same imagery into a work of universal power. The tumult of the open seas, the tumult of faith, the air-born Virgin, and the desperate rowing men all occupy Miro’s print, but you can hardly tell any of them apart. The entire surface has been worked over so thoroughly that at first glance it looks abstract, a square of tree bark. The Virgin is almost indistinguishable from the sky, the men almost indistinguishable from the vaulting ocean. And Miro’s Virgin isn’t draped in the garments of the rich or the pious; her skirt is patterned with palm trees, and it’s not clear whether the sailors below are steering a boat or the island of Cuba itself. Even though the work is done in only one color, a rich burnt orange, the effect is radiant.

No less gripping is a series of three woodcuts by Alejandro Ramón Sainz Alfonso that work so well together, I hope the artist will designate them a triptych. In the first, a large, luminous paper airplane sails out from a kitchen window. It’s about to embark on a nighttime trip over the sea. In the middle, we witness a perplexed, troubled man wearing what looks like the same airplane reshaped into a helmet; his clothes and a nearby flag imply he’s in uniform. In the third picture, an old record player’s fluted speaker is positioned by an open window beyond which a formation of paper airplanes sail away. It’s as if music propelled their flight, as if art were the wind on which change took place.

IN LESS THAN A YEAR, Samson Projects has achieved what eludes many galleries over a lifetime: an enthusiastic following, a considerable buzz, and a defined, dynamic mission, — namely, to showcase emerging and established artists who might otherwise go unseen in Boston. It’s a rare thing these days to walk into a commercial gallery and know immediately that the work you’re seeing got there without regard for its ability to "move." Samson Projects belongs to that small group of presenters whose shows are as principled as they are ground-breaking.

In the current exhibit, nine major Dominican artists come together in an exhibit that ranges from playful to tormented, from whimsical to unsettling. By far the subtlest and most unnerving piece in "¡Dominicanzo!" is Tony Capellán’s Dichotomy, a three-dimensional work of baby-bottle nipples arranged on a car windshield. Dichotomy is one of those art works that tricks you into thinking you’ve seen it as soon as you’ve looked at it. It’s made up of 49 nipples altogether; 39 are chocolate brown, the other 10 are translucent, and they’re arranged so the clear ones line up in the center flanked by their darker cousins. Only on close examination do you realize that a tiny hair protrudes from the apertures of some of the nipples, and then on even closer scrutiny you realize that the hair is the tip of a needle. What at first looked haphazard and nondescript becomes premeditated and ominous.

The mixed-media prints of Pascal Meccariello prove less disturbing but no less engaging. In Celula #1 and Celula #2, we get front and back views of the shirtless torso of the artist. We also appear to get a look at his blood vessels and arteries and capillaries, but they aren’t beneath his skin, they’re above it, and they fill up the frame as if he were struggling through a thicket. What’s more, certain schematics have been stamped on his skin — mechanical designs, trees, the head of a sheep. You have the sense of looking through a microscope and discovering a variety show.

Captivating too are the photo transfers on canvas by Iliana Emilia García, who manipulates simple, domestic imagery — family photos, first-aid kits, teddy bears, kitchen clocks, rotary telephones — to create charged, resonant results. Docent Center is made up of 16 identically sized (roughly eight inches square) pictures, one of whose recurrent motifs is the heart. There’s a glass of red candy hearts, an ice-cube tray that makes heart-shaped ice, a heart-shaped hot-water bottle, a tray of silver heart-shaped charms. Interspersed as they are with other domestic artifacts, they give you the feeling they’re following the ups and downs of somebody’s emotional life. It’s unexpectedly, disarmingly poignant. A painting by the renowned José García Cordero, a video installation and body suits by Elia Alba, architecturally influenced work by Belkis Ramírez, and works by Scherezade García, Mónica Ferreras, and Nicolás Dumit Estévez complete the show.