Judith Larsen's body of work: mixing pattern and figure

In works such as "Interference," Judith Larsen uses bodies as a blank slate for patterns and organizing systems.

Judith Larsen's photos mix pattern and figure elegantly, driving home the idea that we're all merely and miraculously products of systems, living in a world that is a chimera of yet more of them. She does it simply, by projecting patterns onto nude women and photographing (or videotaping) them in black and white.

In her show at Rhys Gallery, the models merge seamlessly into larger forms. You can make out legs and heads, but Larsen deliberately subsumes the human figure, and thus any sense of individuality or narrative of personal struggle or triumph, into whatever sculpture she makes with her models. The bodies become a blank slate for patterns and organizing systems.

"Global Behavior," for instance, features a hemispheric map, gridded with latitude and longitude, projected onto three women who have knotted their bodies into a half circle. Larsen prints many of these pieces as large negatives, so the light of the projection reads in dark lines. This makes the figures more ethereal, because the shadows around them that would ordinarily describe volume now shimmer, seeming to subtract mass.

These photos pull you in because the eye naturally wants to make sense of the figures. They tease because the human forms are hard to read and the patterns so vivid. Even the few in which the bodies easily scan captivate because the negative pushes them to the edge of dissolution. "I-II-III" features two women on their knees, their backs to each other, leaning inward, shoulder to shoulder. The swirling concentric circles projected over them come from a fingerprint, and both forms and pattern make a ring, of sorts - it's Op Art of the flesh.

In Larsen's video "Crossing Over," shimmers of water project over moving women in a liquid dream. The figures play hide-and-seek with the eye; forms make sense, then glints of light and pockets of shadow obscure them.

Another series of photographs, positives in which shadowy figures are dotted with stars and arcs of light, is not as successful because the bodies are not as elusive. People want to see themselves in most of what they look at. In many of these works, Larsen doesn't make it easy, and so she forces us to look more closely. That's always good.

A window into his work
The late Ralph Humphrey started out in the 1950s and '60s as an acolyte of Mark Rothko. Humphrey had a hit with a series of paintings featuring boldly toned boundaries framing tempered grays. Nobody would have anticipated what was to come. The artist, who died at 58 in 1990, began to make art in the 1970s that exploded in color, volume, and texture. The Rothko-esque modulations of color were still there, but they met a Philip Guston-style urge for something grittier, more in your face, more cartoonish.

Humphrey's playful, beautifully toned late works are up at Nielsen Gallery. He loosely based most of these pieces on a window form. In some works, such as the collage "Untitled, Est. 6," the window is evident, made of little slats of wood, with a blue, purple-dotted curtain blowing toward us.

He made larger, almost sculptural works that jut off the wall, such as "Heat," layering tones without mixing them, so the piece reads in flecks of warm color. A long window drops down the center, and big green and blue dots hover as if someone below is blowing bubbles. Deftly made, and much more light-hearted than Rothko, Humphrey's works enchant.

Also at Nielsen, Mildred Howard deploys a printmaking technique that sometimes works and sometimes overwhelms her imagery. Howard runs paper through the press, then she runs buttons through it and affixes the printed buttons onto the paper. Sometimes the buttons effectively distort the image, as if lenses have been placed over it, such as in the portrait of a woman in "Magnolia Project: That Was Then and Here Is Now I." In other instances, the added layer merely distracts.

A gothic spirit
Wilfredo Chiesa seems to drape heaven on a simple armature in his paintings at Pierre Menard Gallery. His "Lumina" series, installed to great effect a few years ago in the Boston Center for the Arts Cyclorama, works almost as well in a more economical installation here, with several of the 10-foot-long scrolls hanging back to back. Three more provide a backdrop against the wall.

Chiesa starts with a few straight lines and then he adds color, texture, and atmosphere. The diptych "BLU 3" sits in a corner; the two panels meet and melt into a pale, creamy passage, like a flash of morning sunlight. Chiesa frames those in sky blue, and the far ends are darker, more intense blues. These are straight-ahead modernist paintings, but they have the spirit of gothic cathedrals behind them, reaching ever higher - if not in height, then in tone and spirit - in praise and gratitude.