Not a follower of fashions

WATERTOWN -- If you haven't heard of Martin Barooshian, it's because his paintings and prints have always gone against the grain of the art scene. He's a Surrealist who arrived late to the table that de Chirico, Dali, and Magritte set. His images are dreamlike, dense with oblique meaning, and packed with symbols.

Barooshian, who turns 77 this year, has a small, bracing 50-year retrospective up at the Armenian Library & Museum of America. In some ways, this artist comes across as trapped in another era. But the exhibition also traces the development of a master technician who has constantly challenged his own aesthetic.

His early forms, fleshy and biomorphic, coalesce into whatever your eye wants to see. The 1956 painting ``Athena Nike" shows a woman whose flesh seems to fold, curl, and reform itself into design elements; she's half woman, half fleur de lis.

Barooshian used intricate compositions to evince strength and momentum. The intaglio print with engraving ``Bronco Rider" (1961) deploys bold lines to describe the bone, muscle, and contour of the bronco, building up into a circular sweep of movement.

Twenty years later, his canvases were freighted with odd, dreamlike images. Many of the women in his paintings from the 1980s are Amazons, brawny and faceted like diamonds -- Pablo Picasso meets Stan Lee. ``Vision 4 -- Night Murmurs" (1983) centers on a woman with a hat in her lap beside a waterfall of design elements that might add up to another figure, painted in shards of color. Many of the paintings of this era are absorbing, but so dense they feel cluttered.

Most recently, Barooshian has let loose his passion for design in bright, flat paintings built up, Pointillist style, out of tiny dabs of color. These read as a cross between fanciful mosaic and stained-glass window, dominated by bold forms, such as a Cheshire cat and a rooster. Occasionally, he introduces text, which can distract from the power of his imagery and colorful technique.

Barooshian's been a successful working artist, if not widely known, for decades. He never hit it big because his imagination wasn't in synch with the times. But if he didn't reinvent painting, he did reinvent himself, and that's worth seeing.

Martin Barooshian: A 50 Year Retrospective of Paintings, Prints, and Drawings
At: the Armenian Library & Museum of America, 65 Main St., Watertown, through June 1. 617-926-2562, www.almainc.org.

Ellen Rich: New Work
At: Genovese/Sullivan Gallery, 450 Harrison Ave., through May 30. 617-426-9738, www.genovesesullivan.com.

Jered Sprecher: New Paintings
At: osp gallery, 450 Harrison Ave., through June 3. 617-778-5265, www.ospgallery.com.

Ellen Rich's wall sculptures have for years celebrated the weird juncture between organic and man-made. In her new Genovese/Sullivan Gallery show, the earliest pieces (dated 2004) are swirly masses of styrofoam painted in gaudy pink and blue; the pink one has little spheres, like green grapes, jammed in the interstices. Rich's work can be bravura and in your face, but in the shadows there's often something tender and surprising.

Her last show featured grids; this one celebrates spheres, clustering and rising like bubbles. She paints balls on acetate in many colors. One untitled painting has circles jumbled against a dark, painterly grid, as if she's trying to trap champagne bubbles in a wire cage.

Rich continues to excel where she always has -- at wall sculptures. She makes wood wedges in undulating shapes, then affixes circles on top in rubber and styrofoam, or in paint. Her shifting textures are as disarming as her usually bright color palette. One styrofoam wall piece is poison green with pale green circles painted on it. She has cut out a large, central circle and stuffed it with green drinking straws, which fan out like dozens of antennae and create a three-dimensional moire effect as you walk past.

All the pieces share Rich's sci-fi B-movie aesthetic, but besides being endearingly goofy, they're formally taut and always pushing toward more complexity.

Like a hip-hop DJ, Jered Sprecher puts his art together by sampling. His evocative paintings at osp gallery are not collages so much as traces of things he has seen before, tiny ephemera that he isolates and regenerates. Bar codes, utility wires, and a star pattern on a little girl's bedspread all make their way onto Sprecher's delicate canvases.

His intent observation and reapplication of the forgotten or ignored makes his abstract paintings quiet and subdued. It's as if you're wandering around in the recesses of your mind, trying to recall something, and then you happen into a feeling that is potent and familiar. This isn't conceptual art -- it's limbic art, all about emotional resonance, triggered by sensation.

``Like A Child" features three black rectangles -- symbols from a shipping label, blown up and exaggerated -- floating over that star pattern, which is orange on gray. There's a painterly fluidity to the brushwork that suggests we've just stepped into a river of imagery that will soon disperse. An untitled painting of a skewed black diamond under a diagonal line might represent a kite flying under a utility wire, or, if you look at it differently, a dark window under the eaves of a pale yellow house. Sprecher's paintings are evasive and ungraspable, but always poignant.