From intimacy to abstraction

Photographer Saul Leiter's New York -- a little patch of 10th Street in the middle of the 20th century -- shows up at Gallery Kayafas as a revelation. Leiter isn't a documentary photographer or social commentator, like Robert Frank. Nor is he a formalist, like Aaron Siskind. He didn't shoot New Yorkers so much as the city itself, and he did it intimately, so that a simple image -- a man's foot resting on a subway seat; a red umbrella in the snow -- feels fresh, yet utterly familiar and intrinsically New York.

Leiter trained as a painter, and these color photographs display a delicate, painterly approach to tone. The subject of "Red Umbrella" is but a small, bright smear in a scene otherwise taken up with the brown-sugar grime of a well-traveled street after a snowfall. "Snow, 1960" is also a cloud of grays, as we glimpse a man through a misty window, but the backdrop of a yellow truck frames the man and catalyzes an otherwise dreary scene.

The photographer frames images in a way that flouts artistic convention -- often, the action seems to be taking place just beyond or at the very edge of the picture -- yet reaffirms how a pedestrian walking down a city street can see the world peripherally.

I love "Man on Ladder," in which we see only the man's feet, humbly perched beneath cuffed work pants on a rung at the top of the frame. That leaves room for the viewer's eye to rove up the paint-spattered ladder, back to the shop window behind it, filled with fishing rods on sale for a few bucks. Everything about the man is read from the wonderful details of his shoes and pant legs; there's something endearing about the worn soles, the slightly turned-in ankle.

Leiter also painted on his photographs. There are four such pieces here. They're garish and shoddy beside the color photos. He dabbed over pictures of nude or almost nude women; they're boring, pinup-type shots. The painting, frenetic and bright, makes the photos beneath look all the more drab.

In the back room at Gallery Kayafas, Pelle Cass's photographs of assemblages buzz with mark-making. He shoots assemblages he's made, over which he has written or drawn. For "Ziggurat," he wrote on four sheets, then folded each accordion-style and stacked them so the folds of one are perpendicular to those of the next. With the words racing over them almost illegibly, it's a lovely, tensile tower of Babel.

Jules de Balincourt is a young artist with a hot reputation, known for his biting social critiques and a style that has the roughed-up, naïve quality of outsider art. He's no outsider, though, having gotten his master's in fine arts from Hunter College in 2005. His show at Mario Diacono at Ars Libri is exciting and angry. It's a large abstract painting on panel. Pure abstraction is a departure for de Balincourt, who is known for images of giant conference tables and maps of the United States, among other things.

Note the past tense in the title, which runs in a rush of capital letters across the bottom: "ALLWEWERESAYINGWASGIVEPEACEACHANCE." The suggestion is that it's too late, and that the image somehow represents the implosion of hope. But the design can be seen more than one way. The work is scuffed and awkward looking, but visually and geometrically sophisticated: It's a looping series of figure-eights in rainbow colors. The juncture in the middle of the panel could be either a black hole, sucking in all the light and matter around it, or a big-bang moment of creation. It's a searing and ambitious painting.

George Lloyd, once a San Francisco Bay Area Abstract Expressionist, has lived for more than 20 years in Portland, Maine. ACME Fine Art has a compelling show of some of his work painted in the 1970s and '80s. Although he's an abstract painter, Lloyd, whose father was an architect, often takes off from interiors, figures, and still lifes.

"Still Life with Bowler Hat and Toy Iron" (1972) brims with bold, confident gestures and vibrant tones, and you can make out the circle of the hat and the iron's curve and gaudy red handle. It's a rollicking composition, but it wasn't until the 1980s that Lloyd hit upon a gold mine with his lush, intimate interiors. In pieces such as "Interior with Cloud" (1987) he constructs space, then wittily foils it.

"Interior with Cloud" has us gazing dreamily out a window, its sill swiped with glowing, milky pink; the sky in the distance is the inky blue of late dusk.

But the cloud of the title is not in the sky, it's a gold-and-brown haze in the foreground of the painting, disrupting the strong lines of the room Lloyd has situated us in. He has an understated but assured hand with color; there are surprisingly rapturous notes singing amid pedestrian earth tones. But the colors, and the confident brushwork, take a backseat to Lloyd's pulse back and forth between depth and flatness, representation and abstraction.