From overwhelming to energetic

Cristi Rinklin studies what it takes to portray that kind of beauty. Her paintings at FP3 Gallery consider how the sublime has been constructed over time, by American and European painters, and more recently by filmmakers and software designers. She deploys a variety of their conceits.

These are gorgeous, sweeping, and often overwhelming works. While they’re not literally landscapes, they cite them, as deep space roils with atmospheric action. Still, without a horizon line, there’s nowhere to land; the viewer gets uncomfortably swept up into the scene. Colors tense against one another. Cartoony or graphic-design elements return the eye to the painting’s surface, where fleshy forms tangle and pull, ratcheting up the drama.

Rinklin is one of a growing number of painters who start and finish with the hand, but add an intermediate step on the computer. She photographs the early stages of a piece, then distorts the image with Photoshop, making a digital sketch before going on to create her large-scale, mixed-media works. She paints her backgrounds with an airbrush, imbuing them with a comforting blur. The colors are less naturalistic than in any 19th-century painting, but familiar to users of 21st-century technology.

The orange, fleshy forms twisting diagonally across the foreground of “After the End of the Beginning’’ recall the hands of God and Adam in Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam.’’ They tumble over a ground of mauve and turquoise, sinister with shifting shadows. Translucent veils of hard-edged filigrees radiate out across the surface from the orange forms. Graphically drawn clouds in neon orange and periwinkle throw in another visual language. In “The Persistent Nature of Past, Present and Future’’ an aggressively thrusting red form explodes against a backdrop of fumy blues, grays, and greens, and a billowing ribbon of a turquoise cartoon cloud drops down the center.

The works can be daunting with all their plays of light, space, and form; Rinklin throws everything she can at the aluminum panels on which she paints. Unlike Church and Cole, she’s trying to deconstruct, rather than inspire; her paintings balance on the edge between dream and nightmare. Then again, the sublime is supposed to be awesome, on the edge of frightening.

“Faces’’ is a grid of portraits of men and women in 19th-century costume; they might be characters from a Jane Austen novel. White garlands and vines lead from their mouths and eyes, a metaphorical stand-in for communication. It’s all a little too pretty, but the background grabbed me: a moody, cloud-strewn landscape that looks as if it was painted 200 years ago. It’s smudgy and cracked, as if in need of conservation.

In her works on paper, Siems cleverly uses tiny, flower-shaped pieces punched from found texts to create the bodies of her figures. The man at the bottom of “Lips Drawing’’ has such a form, with his face painted on top. It suggests he’s not quite real. Above him, a woman looks down, spilling pale beige laurels over the man’s head, as if casting a spell. Many of Siems’s works have the suggestion of magic and metaphor about them, but I think she strives too hard to get there.

Up now is “Human Drift,’’ a scrappy, ambitious show put on by a crew of young artists, most of them recent grads from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Sculptors Rachel Salamone and Christopher Wawrinofsky make dense but effervescent pieces out of everything but the kitchen sink, both physically and philosophically. Wawrinofsky’s giant “Borg Queen Arch’’ has a cheesy baroque headboard from a bed at its top and references both “Star Trek’’ and Bernini’s “Ecstasy of St. Teresa.’’

Monica Nydam posted an ad on Craigslist asking people to send images of something they loved. One person sent 45 pictures of a horse. Nydam’s crisp, poignant “Untitled (Horse Series)’’ paintings show the horse fading from view. Véronique d’Entremont uses Google street view as a source for her paintings of mundane buildings; she intends to make postcards of them and mail them to the addresses they depict. Both painters reach for human connection through the Internet.

Ryan Crowley’s wry plaster sculptures invoke Claes Oldenburg, Philip Guston, and Walt Disney. Matthew Lane’s spare sculptures recall familiar objects, such as a blade of grass, but remain just odd enough to be different. There’s definitely a “Hey kids, let’s put on a show’’ vibe about “Human Drift’’ - the titular theme is a catch-all - but the work has energy.