Culture of custom cars drives sculptor

Vincent Szarek's wall sculpture "Amorphous and Fumed" has the muscular curves and eye-candy designs of a custom hot rod. In an unusual pairing, he has brought together visual languages from art, religion, and popular culture.

Minimalism, mysticism, and car culture spectacularly collide in Vincent Szarek's wall sculpture "Amorphous and Fumed." The piece pulses off the wall of Mario Diacono at Ars Libri like a blue beacon. Buffed and detailed, the urethane fiberglass work has the muscular curves and eye-candy designs of a custom hot rod.

Szarek, a Rhode Island-born New York artist, isn't the first to use the urethane sheen or detailing tricks of custom autos in his work. Bill Thompson has been seducing his viewers with warped, high-gloss surfaces for years; Brian Zink deploys auto-detailing decals. But Szarek goes big and flagrantly 3D with "Amorphous and Fumed" (the title refers to the silicon he uses to thicken his fiberglass, but could as easily describe an altered state of mind).

The basic heptagonal form is clean and minimalist . So is the fact that Szarek could produce a dozen editions of it; he casts the fiberglass as if it were bronze. A second, smaller heptagon swells out from the middle of the first. Its center, as Diacono writes in a handout, is also its peak, from which six blue flames radiate. The sleek design, with its sinuous lines, verges on Art Nouveau. The 3D form appears to undulate rapturously around the flames, which reach out , suggesting a star shape.

It's a magnificent mandala, the Hindu and Buddhist circular symbol for the universe, so multifaceted with its layers of blue and turquoise, its spiraling and twining patterns, and its round, rippling form that it could easily be a meditation object. Szarek has effectively conflated visual languages from art, religion, and popular culture (think of surfboards and skateboards as well as cars) that we rarely associate with one another. The result is a ride worth taking.

Sculptor Steve Hollinger bites off more thematically than he can chew in "Atomic," his reflections at Chase Gallery on the atomic age . It's nonetheless a remarkable show -- not for its insights, but for its beauty.

Hollinger has always been as much inventor as artist. All of the sculptures here are solar-powered and use polarizing technology to modulate light transmission. It's the same technology used in the 3D movies of the 1950s, Polaroid film, and today's sunglasses.

The sculptor sets his experiments in vintage wooden explosives boxes from the 1940s and '50s. Most feature sheets of polarizing film with light passing through them, in a miraculous cascade of muted colors. Several pieces center on a spherical space that is defined only by a thin belt of film wrapped around its exterior, mimicking the path of an atom's electrons. Colors careen along this beltway with no provocation other than the light waves passing through it. It's captivating.

Other pieces use the same trick -- in "Greenhouse," the rainbow spirals down a vine of filmy buds -- but the effect never palls. Most works don't initially reveal their magic. You have to lean in and really engage with the art, and then you're rewarded with a light show.

The sculptures don't try to come to grips with the power, both destructive and creative, of nuclear energy. Hollinger does offer photographs that wrestle more actively with his subject matter. "Atomic/Red" features a grid of 16 Polaroid emulsions -- that's the thin skin you lift off a Polaroid photo -- that he created from images of atomic tests. The mushroom clouds explode, and the emulsions seem to crumple and shrivel in response, as if they cannot contain the power they're depicting.

Jeffrey Gibson's paintings at Samson Projects are eye-catching, but they're more dazzle than substance. Gibson, a Cherokee-Choctaw artist, starts out painting a base image that is often totemic. Then he layers that with stencils, spray paint, and gorgeous brushstrokes in a way that presumably embraces his cultural heritage, urban street life, and references to abstract expressionism .

The result reads like Helen Frankenthaler on acid. Veils of color seductively waft open, revealing hard-edged gaps where Gibson painted over stencils; you could fall into another layer of color and gesture as easily as you could trip into a swimming pool. In some works, such as "Continuum," he tosses yet another layer onto the surface, spraying on insulating foam and sculpting it into blobs.

Gibson uses his tools well; he knows how to flourish a brush. But there's so much going on, the works lose their centers. I'd like to send him back to art school to study the power of simplicity: the incredible textures and tonalities in a monochrome like one of Frank Stella's black paintings, for instance. Bravado, skill, and candy colors only go so far. Sometimes, the best work arises from stillness and quiet.