Critics' picks - visual arts

Still life

Spain's Antonio Lopez Garcia is a realist of the most painstaking, fastidious kind. In his best paintings and drawings, you get a sense of the visible world as an intricate and luminous scrim that might be torn open at any moment; the sensation can be thrilling. At other times, his art is so stiff that it threatens to crumble upon touch. For all their contemporary detail, his images seem to exist outside history; there is something uncanny in their stillness. At the Museum of Fine Arts through July 27. 617-267-9300, mfa.org - Sebastian Smee

Another green world

In "Looking at Leaves: Photographs by Amanda Means," the photographer exalts and monumentalizes leaves. The images often look alien, even extraterrestrial; they belong to real worlds, even if those worlds may not seem to be our own. At the Harvard Museum of Natural History, Cambridge, though Feb. 8. 617-495-3095, hmnh.harvard.edu

- Mark Feeney