Beauty in a mad world

A large flower hangs in the entryway to Carlotta Carzaniga's exhibition ``The Gardens of Madness" at Genovese/Sullivan Gallery. Its voluptuous petals unfurl in fine, knitted wire. The stamen, made from red beads, glints at the center, and gauze floats around it like morning dew on spider webs. It's finely made, lushly sensual, and enticing -- except that it's almost all black, a funereal blossom that both attracts and repels.

Carzaniga, a young Italian artist who last year graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, takes insanity as her subject. She makes a terrific installation that can be light, airy, and intoxicating, then grab you like an undertow and pull you into dissonance and confusion. It's smart and unnerving work.

One piece, ``The Gardens of Madness: Lost Ego," is a room full of suspended flowers made of wire, gauze, and beads. Unlike the entryway piece, these blossoms buzz with bright colors: tiger-lily orange, electric blue, bubble - gum pink. They hang languorously, spinning slowly on drafts of air. There's a giddy quality to them, yet walking through them is discomforting -- like making your way through a cobweb-infested attic. There's no boundary between viewer and art; a spindly flower might bat your ear or tangle in your hair. Boundaries make us feel safe. As girly and sweet as ``Lost Ego" initially appears, it's also insidious.

Next to each piece, the artist posts texts written by people with schizophrenia. They're not necessary, but they are poetic and clarifying. The ``Lost Ego" text reads as much like a Buddhist meditation on enlightenment as the descriptions of a mind going astray: ``Sometimes I feel that I have lost my ego and I mingle with nature. I look at a flower and the flower is no longer detached from me: The flower and I become a whole."

``The Gardens of Madness: Swallowed by the Fast River" features a whitewater rush of tulle on the floor, like a long, entangled bridal veil. Over it hang eight Plexiglas panels, each festooned with 100 beaded flowers. Wire roots from the pink buds dangle down toward the river. These roots read like a frenetic, tensile three-dimensional drawing, hopelessly reaching for earth only to be threatened with drowning.

Carzaniga has the courage to explore a topic many would strictly and fearfully avoid, and she has found a surprising degree of beauty there.

Jessica Straus has created her own garden at the Danforth Museum of Art. The wood sculptor activates the gallery space with crawling vines, woolly bear caterpillars, and grasshoppers. It's a pleasant show, full of fertility and life-cycle references, with just an edge of darkness right in the center.

That's where Straus has positioned a face-off between two coiled vines. The dark one, ``Twirl," wrapped in black leather, represents her mother, she has said. The green one, ``Entwined," which holds within it a second spiral, represents the artist herself. The black one looks almost like a viper; the green one suggests holding and mothering. The loops of each could be loosening or tightening, letting go or clenching down.

Dyads such as this anchor a show that is otherwise pure whimsy. Another coil called ``Tumbleweed" loosely embraces pine needles. The woolly bears delightfully scoot along near the floor right up the wall to a shelf, bristling in their black-and-brown coats. Brightly speckled cucumbers festoon the walls, and a dark vine circles the gallery, gathering disparate pieces effectively together into one installation. There's no madness in this garden, just the rhythms, miracles, and tensions of an ordinary earthbound life.

Green Street Gallery has finally reopened -- after six months of negotiation and renovation of its MBTA-owned space on the Orange Line in Jamaica Plain -- with a show that doesn't quite fit. David Faust is a realist painter, and a very good one, but his work doesn't share the conceptual sophistication we're used to at Green Street.

Gallery director James Hull has reached for high concept by installing a grid of Faust's photographs amid the paintings. The photos, which Faust seems to take obsessively, are part of his process -- the compost from which the flowers of his paintings bloom. And they do evidence the artist's quirky eye: A man grills in his yard with a dead deer on the lawn behind him; cars are glimpsed through a windshield at night; the artist's father is asleep in a hospital bed.

The paintings are as varied, and maybe that's the problem. It's not clear what Faust is trying to get his arms around as an artist. A painting of a suburban lawn seen through a louvered window suggests he's examining the edge between pictorial illusion and the picture plane. One of a bonfire hints at a mystical agenda, as well as the painterly one of capturing flame on canvas.

Faust is at his best painting light. ``The Wait" elegantly shows the silhouette of a man on a boat, with sunlight splashing on the water ahead. ``In the Trees" sets us gazing up at the dark, needled boughs of fir trees as the sky deepens to dusk behind them; the gradation of color from pale green to an energized, crepuscular blue is beautifully executed.