A glowing reference to painters past

Dutch still lifes overflow with abundance: exorbitant banquet tables, flowers in full bloom. They might be paeans to the materialism generated by a thriving economy, or critiques of it (especially when the painted food and flowers began to decay and wilt ). The theme easily fits contemporary American life, and it's one painter Robert Amesbury seizes with gusto in his show at Bernard Toale Gallery, "Pronk."

He gleefully appropriates images from Dutch masters such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Jan van Huysum and throws in references to pop culture. He jam-packs most of his works not only with forms and metaphors, but with color and sheen: They almost jump off the wall to boogie with your eyes.

"Big Fish Devours Little Fish" borrows from Bruegel; it sports a fish with glimmering scales sliced to the gills with a shimmering knife and stuffed with grapes and french fries. A lobster claw draped with shining pearls spills from its mouth. A Burberry bag, a Budweiser can, a Warholian can of Campbell's pork and beans all lie about. Either this is a gaudy feast or unfortunate trash washed ashore on a dirty beach.

Amesbury is a wonderful technician, creating nuanced surfaces with his gouache. In previous shows, his focus has been all pop culture, all the time, and this turn toward art history is smart and bracing.

The earlier works were even denser with imagery. The artist allows a little more breathing space here, but he could use even more; gorgeous as these pieces are, there's a whiff of grandstanding, of "Look what I can do!" that sets the artist before the painting -- and we want to see Amesbury's art, because it's more and more ambitious and intriguing.

Mary Lum has a wonderful show in Toale's smaller gallery. A wall of small prints, collages, and paintings set up in a shifting horizontal grid reads almost like a graphic novel; the imagery is all about relations among lines and planes and how they shape our perception of space. Her collages cleverly reinvent space using the reverse sides of panel grids cut out of old comic books.

Then there's "Wall Drawing of Nowhere #205," depicting one of the collages on a large scale. Broad lines, each with snippets of color and comic-book graphics, describe towers and a walkway, transforming a corner of the gallery into something more open and grand.

The abstract painter Katherine Porter is known for making politically themed works, but none of her canvases now at Nielsen Gallery are overtly ideological. They are percussive in tone and composition, as if clattering busily about in an effort to find some peace and quiet.

Most revolve around large central shapes, such as the burning orange square in "Celestial Electric Set." A steely arc, pale triangles, and jangly lines tumble around and behind it, over a rumbling patchwork of gray, brown, and green that resembles a distant cityscape. Porter's works are strong, commanding paintings, but underlined with yearning.

Arthur Dove's small watercolors make a poignant counterpoint to Porter's stridency. Dove was an early American abstract painter, and these works from the 1930s teeter satisfyingly between abstraction and representation. The central form in "Covered Boat" (1932) is loose and shaped like a tulip not quite open. There's a stillness and spontaneity, a meditative clarity to Dove's works that underscores his inward focus, which is quite a contrast to Porter's more declamatory style.

I first saw Kitty Wales's work maybe 15 years ago; she'd filled a gallery with big, gnarly sculptures of wild pigs. She's still depicting animals -- in her show at Boston Sculptors Gallery, it's dogs, specifically a mix between border collies and Australian cattle dogs.

Wales has a knack for capturing a creature's character in line, form, and material. In "Border," the dogs are tense steel forms guarding a gate. They're familiar, mildly threatening, and fun to interact with, but there aren't enough of them.

"Dog Machine" is a comic setup: The black-and-white dogs, attached to a giant knitting machine, are having their fur pulled off and knit into sweaters. The joke is too elaborate and clunky; I'd prefer to have seen the dogs simply, in shepherd mode.

Nancy Selvage mixes up actual, suggested, and symbolic content in her works, also at Boston Sculptors. Sometimes she relies too heavily on the suggested, as in "Hunt," a series of photographs of melting snow, into which we're supposed to read the forms of animals. It's a stretch.

However, her sculptures "Evidence" and "Constellation" are compelling and satisfyingly mysterious. "Evidence" is a skewed stack of blocks, "Constellation" takes the shape of a prone woman. Each contains deep, mirrored holes you peer into. Inside are kaleidoscopic paintings or small sculptures. The mirrors contort the view. These works are treasure hunts, with each compartment holding a metaphoric clue, leading each viewer down his or her own deductive path.