Scenes from a Roman holiday

Painter Cristi Rinklin's smart, eye-popping canvases are known for their loop-de-loop approach to space and their candy colors. Her new mural installation, ``Nuvolomondo," on the walls and in the windows of the Tufts University Art Gallery's Harry Remis Sculpture Court , lets the sun shine through, which takes the tones and the depth of her work even further.

The result is intoxicating: a spinning, jiving, back-flipping abstraction of simmering red-orange cloud formations dancing the tango with a loose-limbed ribbon of turquoise.

Rinklin is a painter's painter, but she has her feet squarely in the 21st century. The illusion of space fascinates her, and what it takes to build it. She does so by layering sources from Rococo art to decorative textiles and cosmological imagery. While she usually paints by hand, first she processes her material on the computer, prodding it, blurring it, and making it into something of her own.

``Nuvolomondo" follows Rinklin's stay in Rome as a visiting artist and scholar in residence at the American Academy, where she was inspired by Baroque ornament, architecture, and stained glass. The result is a brilliant, translucent world of clouds across the window panels of the sculpture court. They naturally coalesce into fantastic ribbed moldings and flourishing details, then poof back into red-edged cumulus formations.

She designed the window segments on the computer and printed them on clear panels, then added stenciled vinyl. The wall segments, which echo the window images but with flatter, simplified gestures, were hand-painted. Those gestures crawl like tendrils around the main event in the windows. There, images look at first purely organic, then reveal the surprising period references. Up close, a viewer feels cozily enveloped in the clouds. Step away, and you'll see that the mural in each block of windows isn't merely an atmospheric scene, but symmetric, kaleidoscopic, and intricately planned out.

Every time you turn around, ``Nuvolomondo" offers up another surprise. This installation will grab even those who know nothing about painting, Roman architecture, or stained glass. It glows and rollicks; it washes over the viewer the way clean ocean waves roll onto the beach.

Matthew Nash and Jason Dean , a.k.a Harvey Loves Harvey, the pranksters who deploy lowbrow humor to make highbrow conceptual art, are at it again, this time working with New York performance artist Lee Walton. They sawed a mystery novel by Louis Bromfield into thirds. Dean read the top third, Walton read the middle, and Nash read the bottom. Then the three met at a New York library to make sense of ``The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg."

``Book Club," the resulting exhibit at the New England School of Art and Design at Suffolk University, features three concurrent videos of their discussion, each focused on one artist. They perch on bookshelves that are filled with bric-a-brac and books cut into thirds. The three-channel video reiterates the fractured nature of their reading experience.

The exhibit falls victim to a common problem with performance art: The documentation, which we see, is not as satisfying as the performance itself might have been. But stick with it, and pieces begin to come together. The more Walton, Dean, and Nash talk, the more excited they become, putting together the novel's mystery and the mystery they created by chopping the novel up. The viewer's satisfaction, though, could never match theirs.

``Book Club" is not as funny as a lot of Harvey Loves Harvey's work, and it's only partially successful, but it does tangle with their favorite theme: the struggle to communicate. It suggests that even when we're all caught up in our own part of the story, we can work together to understand the whole.

Any one of Colombian artist Jorge Drosten's paintings in his show at Arden Gallery is absorbing. The warm-tone images of people standing on the beach or surrounded by foliage are dreamy, pleasing, and beautifully painted. Each central figure (sometimes there are two -- twins, hence the show's title, ``Twin Allegories") holds something: a fish, a ship model, a snake.

Taken together, though, the works are repetitive and cloying. The same face peers out of every painting, wide, almond-eyed, and unnervingly placid. Stand in the middle of the gallery for a while with all those serene figures gazing at you, and you may feel as if you've stepped into a South American version of ``The Stepford Wives."

Taken alone, one of these paintings can be as enigmatic as it is sunny. ``Tattoo Man" depicts a portly, balding chap in a loincloth. Vines of tattoos run up his legs. He's framed by foliage; the sky crowns him with illuminated clouds. He holds a dark, coiled snake. The viper adds the hint of darkness and shadow that this sun-soaked exhibition cries out for.