At three sites, new management and fresh ideas

This summer, three notable local galleries closed their doors.

Locco Ritoro, which for the past couple of years has exhibited Pop and Op-inflected art by local and national artists and lush photos by internationally known photographer Meridel Rubenstein, changed hands when owner Paul Lam sold to an unnamed buyer.

"It's a large family gallery with locations in New York and Europe, looking to get into smaller markets like Chicago and Boston," says Lam, who has signed a nondisclosure agreement. "They will be looking for a space in Boston and wanted an option to my name and consulting and collector list." Lam's artists have been cut loose.

Enter William Kerr and Paul Riedl, owners of Paul Alexander Gallery in Framingham. The two, who have no connection to Locco Ritoro's buyer, have taken over Lam's Harrison Avenue lease (though not his artists) and turned the space into Gallery XIV.

The first show features paintings by Marcus Antonius Jansen, whose art must be measured beside his bloated self-promotion; his publicity materials say that he has founded a movement called "Modern Urban-Expressionism."

Jansen is no progenitor of a radical new vision, just another purveyor of a trend that marries street art with painterly technique and collage. Still, he is a gifted painter. There's a little Rauschenberg in his work, and moments of Rothko, peppered with the graffiti sensibilities of Barry McGee.

He makes deft use of space in his large canvases, which appear sweeping while leading the eye to tiny, charismatic details. "Subway Housing" opens into a capacious subway car. The floor shimmers in a drippy flood of pearly beiges; the walls breathe with green. Jansen scrawls graffiti over it - a jagged dancing figure, a fawn.

On one seat, he has collaged bits cut from magazines - a prim kitten, a bunch of bananas. They look so sweetly out of place in a subway, and amid all this paint, that they rivet the eye, as does a dark figure in the middle of the car, hulking yet delicate.

Jansen's gritty, Expressionistic works situate innocence against a hallucinatory backdrop of loss and threat. He may not be a new master, but his work deserves a look.

A bright touch

Genovese/Sullivan Gallery, a scrappy commercial space that often showed bold, edgy, uncommercial art, was a staple in the South End for more than 20 years. Owners Camellia Genovese and David Sullivan started in a Harrison Avenue loft when the South End's warehouse district was much less polished than it is now.

"I always liked it when it wasn't so many," Genovese said in 2003, after galleries flooded onto Harrison Avenue. "There's something about the mysteriousness of having to come someplace out of the way, the sense that you're on an adventure. Because art is a scary thing. It should be mysterious."

They won't comment on the closing. Meanwhile Julie Chae has taken over the space. Chae moved to Boston from New York, where she worked as a lawyer and arts administrator. Her first show, "Prelude," features an exciting roster, from established artists such as eye-popping pattern painter Barbara Takenaga to those just hatched from art school such as draftsman Alexander DeMaria, whose delicate, stuttering drawings are made by tracing projections of old animation cels.

Chae has an eye for work that sports bright colors and stunningly intricate patterns. Brian Chippendale's winsome screenprint collage "The Well-Balanced Meal" is so stacked with patterns you might lose your way through the Alice-in-Wonderland-style scene of a cat and an elf. In Dannielle Tegeder's mixed-media works on paper, slender lines and sharp angles define shards spinning over the page.

There are quieter moments as well, including Cynthia Lin's up-close drawings of hair and skin and ICA Foster Prize winner Kelly Sherman's heartbreaking "To Move (Ours. Mine.)," two lists of possessions that coolly delineate the end of a relationship.

Found objects

Rebecca Gordon carved Second Gallery out of a little cranny in the Distillery, the South Boston artists building owned by her father, Fred Gordon, in January 2006, and she made it a must-see alternative gallery for installation art. Gordon has moved on to Chicago to go to grad school. She passed the space on to Kara Braciale and Julia Hechtman, who have christened it Proof.

"We're viewing this as a project space," says Braciale. "It is a commercial gallery, but we were lucky to inherit a space without a lot of overhead. We can just show work we're excited by."

Now they're showing New York artist Jeff DeGolier's Rube Goldberg-style sculptures fashioned from salvaged trash and recyclables. He installs tiny motors that make the works hum, spin, and vibrate. Accumulation alone does not make cohesive art, though. The simplest works here - such as "25 Cent Orca," a jigsaw puzzle with a whale vibrating on the wall - are the most appealing.

Marcus Antonius Jansen: Modern Urban Expressionism
At: Gallery XIV, 450 Harrison Ave., through Oct. 20. 617-482-1414, galleryxiv.com

Prelude
At: Julie Chae Gallery, 450 Harrison Ave., through Oct. 27. 617-357-0001, juliechaegallery.com

Jeff DeGolier: Fringe Benefits
At: Proof, 516 East Second St., South Boston, through Nov. 3. 508-963-9102, proof-gallery.com