A glimpse into imagination

Gerry Bergstein's "Brain" sits on a low platform on the floor at Gallery NAGA. The sculpture -- an unusual enterprise for one of Boston's premier painters -- is a model, of sorts, of the contents of the artist's own cerebellum: A heap of paper cutouts held together with Scotch tape. At probably 3 feet across, it's a comic, tangled mess of ideas and inspirations. Marge Simpson is there. So are snippets from art history, from Fra Angelico to Philip Guston. Feet and hands jut out from the bottom of the pile. Bergstein himself shows up more than once.

``Brain" and other works in his NAGA show are delightful representations of Bergstein's roiling and spewing imagination. For years, he has been celebrating and anguishing over the cycle of creation and destruction in clever and ambitious trompe l'oeil paintings. His works have the restless energy of a fever dream.

``Do You Come Here Often ? " is a 9-foot-tall canvas that typifies his current crop of work. Bergstein paints a drawing on canvas: It looks like an enormous tower on paper that has been folded and torn, as if he's been carrying it around in his wallet for years. The building is a bloated behemoth, apparently drawn in ink or graphite. Behind the tears in the paper, we can glimpse a star-strewn, inky black galaxy. At the bottom of the canvas, Bergstein has painted a tiny version of himself, frantically mending the edge of a rip. The tower is like a mental construct, central to his self-worth, and it's evidently on the verge of dissolution.

The trompe l'oeil technique, combined with his comic send-up of his own long-suffering humanity, make Bergstein's works endlessly engaging. ``The Agony and the Ecstasy" is a painting that convinces us we're looking at a blackboard. With Bergstein, you think you know what's real, and you're often wrong. The slate dissolves to reveal the blue sky behind -- or a painting of blue sky; the shards of blackboard cast a shadow. A big paintbrush, made from paint, sits on the board. Two painted drawings, tacked on with painted masking tape, show self-portraits -- one groaning, the other grinning.

With his ``Brain" sculpture, and several clever digital prints such as ``Elementary My Dear Watson," in which all the sculpture's legs appear to propel it across a paint-splattered floor, Bergstein ventures beyond his safety zone of paint on canvas. Not that it was ever truly safe there. These works aren't as multilayered as the paintings, but they're witty, and they have the potential to be as riddling and darkly comic as the works this artist is best known for.

Gerry Bergstein: This Is Your Brain On Art
At: Gallery NAGA, 67 Newbury St., through Nov. 4. 617-267-9060, gallerynaga.com

Greg Mencoff and Victor Schrager
At: Bernard Toale Gallery, 450 Harrison Ave, through Nov. 4. 617-482-2477, bernardtoalegallery.com

Kenro Izu: Nudes and Still Lifes
At: Robert Klein Gallery, 38 Newbury St., through Nov. 4. 617-267-5567. robertkleingallery.com

Minimalism can be most exciting when it's unexpectedly luscious, as it is in a two-person show at Bernard Toale Gallery. Greg Mencoff's basswood sculptures have been paired with Victor Schrager's photos of books. Both bodies of work are extraordinarily lean and simple.

Schrager assembles books as forms: They're all blank-faced, narrow-spined, and richly colored. He shoots them with a single point of focus, so that only one edge of one book is razor-sharp; the rest falls into a romantic mist. He makes pigment prints, which look like watercolors, soaking in velvety tones. Amid all that seductive color and texture, that pinpoint of focus rivets the eye. In ``Untitled #52," that spot is in the middle ground, where the edge of a gray book slices down the middle of the print. In the background, yellow and blue volumes carve out hazy passages of color.

Mencoff offers roundish, wall-mounted sculptures, their faces slightly curved and finished with pastel-toned enamel. They project out from the wall, casting interesting shadows, but the real fascination is in what's happening along the sides of each piece: They're beveled and recessed; they sandwich slivers of plywood; they're cut open in slots.

The simplicity of the presentation belies all the nuances revealed in each work.

The Japanese photographer Kenro Izu, best known for his images of sacred places, has narrowed his focus to nudes and still lifes in his show at Robert Klein Gallery. The prints are cyanotype over platinum palladium. He uses the blue palette to investigate and celebrate the nuances of shadow and darkness.

The still lifes in this palette are a bit perplexing; they're spare and formal, and like Schrager's photos they feature a narrow focus, with much of the image falling into a sleepy blue haze. But casting bok choy or peaches in blue takes away much of their identity.

The nudes almost vanish into the shadow, midnight blue on black -- Rembrandt meets Edward Weston. In one work, hands are gently open, one cupping the underside of the other's wrist. In another, a woman's back slopes toward her palely illuminated bottom. There's something languorous about these photos : the blue tones suggest secrecy and privacy; they are an evocation of the unknowable. The nude is an obvious choice for this treatment; portraits would be even more interesting.