Earth and air Defying the elements at Genovese Sullivan and Miller Block BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS

Imagine that some troll society from J.R.R. Tolkien or Scandinavian folklore decided to take up abstract sculpture. That’s the kind of three-dimensional work Jay Swift used to make. Freestanding gnarly pieces that turned in on themselves and seemed strangely proud of their weight and roughness, they looked like cement mushrooms or depraved fire hydrants.

That was then. When I arrived at the opening of the powerful group show "Dense" at Genovese Sullivan Gallery, I knew Swift was on the menu, but he was nowhere to be seen. Not a single squat monolith, not one serendipitous stalagmite in sight. Instead, the walls (walls!) sported a variety of slick, almost space-age confections in granite that were so smoothly made, they could have been machine-cut paper or styrofoam. Gone were the altar pieces for a druid fertility ritual, the colorless, ancient-looking, vaguely phallic forms that I’d associated with the artist. In their place stood a series of flat, zesty, biomorphic constructions that looked ready to fly off the walls as soon as someone turned off the force field. Jay Swift has moved from earth to air, from introverted to extroverted, from unrefined to polished.

In a culture where images of the significantly naked and steroidally chiseled greet us everywhere — magazine covers in checkout lines, late-night infomercials, you name it — what we understand by the word "exercise" has gotten pretty messed up. Above all, we know that exercise is a means to an end, something you do more or less privately before the photo shoot, the sports event, or the pick-up. Piano pupils know differently. Finger exercises aren’t limited to scales or rote drills; many great composers — Bach and Chopin, to name just two — have made exercises into exciting compositions. The means can also be the end.

Some of Jay Swift’s newly flattened sculptures read as exercises in that sense. They feel like the pursuit of an idea, exploratory, energetic, playful. One gray stone shape looks like a thick cow’s udder; could it be Swift’s answer to how droopy can stone be made to look? Others involve combinations of contrasting types of stone; in several works a light-colored egg-shaped form appears embedded in or lifting out from a surrounding case or sack made of an entirely different and dark yet elegantly fitted stone. It’s as if the artist were asking how an abstract work in stone can be made to suggest rebirth.

Swift is said to regard his latest creations as drawings, and that makes sense — they enjoy the immediacy and the ease of gesture we associate with graphite on paper. But they deliver more. In one black granite piece, tiny circular fossil formations lie embedded in the stone, surrounded by gold flecks of mica. Stand up close and you feel you’re looking into a telescope, backward into time, outward into space. If these are drawings, I can’t imagine what we’re in store for.

It’s hard to imagine a more contrary æsthetic spirit to Swift’s than that of Matt Harle. Swift makes stone seem fleeting; Harle makes strands of light rubber suggest the weight of the world. Harle’s cast-rubber wall mountings look like the skeletal outlines of theater curtains. It’s as if the cloth had been cut away from a large drape for a proscenium stage and only the seams remained. The result is that you feel you’re looking at and through his constructions at the same time; the curtain both is about to rise and has long since disappeared. What’s more, the rubber has been left unfinished. Showing dents and chips and peels, each piece could be a discard from some industrial process.

Part of what’s gratifying about "Dense" is its way of playing the unlikeliest works off each other, and the company Harle’s nonchalant, oversized spaghetti formations keep couldn’t be better suited to show off his ambitions. The surrounding walls and tabletops sport not only Jay Swift’s stone animations but also Malcolm Wright’s pensive ceramics and Mary Boochever’s meticulously incandescent abstract paintings. The others wear their labor-intensive craft like a trim tuxedo; Harle has shown up to the party in a T-shirt and torn jeans.

An unpainted smaller piece suggests in its relative shrunken state the tumescence of a string of sausages, with the difference that its sickly yellow color makes it more reminiscent of hospital tubing. No matter what Harle does with his smooth, rope-like hangings, their fleshy texture combines with their architectural shapes to be endlessly evocative. Guts, graphs, Gumby, coat hangers — the mind works to name, categorize, associate, and make sense of these wonderfully nonsensical creations.

Malcolm Wright’s wood-kiln-fired ceramic bowls, vessels, and vases raise and resolve some unexpected tensions. To the touch, his pieces enjoy a peculiar roughness, both smooth and coarse, like a cat’s tongue; and their rich brown colors deliver an analogous earthiness and lack of pretense. Yet the coarseness of his creations is in the service of voluptuous contours — gently undulating, unedged bowls that thin out at their circumferences like petals or leaves. The naturally occurring patterns and somber brown tones of the bowls’ interiors and exteriors would make it seem that the artist has removed himself as far as possible from the creative process: no apparent glaze, no paint, no interference with chance. Then you notice at the bottom of each bowl a small, unobtrusive set of cross-hatched lines painted blue or white, a quiet reminder that every aspect of the works represents the artist’s full involvement, the conscious human hand.

Three Mary Boochever paintings contribute to "Dense"; two I found memorable, even compelling, whereas the third felt like an exercise in the more common sense of the word. Boochever is at her most poetic and resonant when she channels sunlight. A shimmering luminosity emanates outward, beginning in gold and extending to gold and green; the result looks as if you could warm your hands by it. She’s shaped and framed the canvas of one of these æthereal abstractions to resemble the outline of a house, or baseball’s home plate. Flat across the bottom and with its peaked roof at the top, it suggests a Byzantine icon from which the figures have been removed. All that’s left is halo.

NONA HERSHEY works with graphite powder and water color to create cloud formations in her show at the Miller Block Gallery. We’re used to seeing clouds at a distance, and only rarely do they look anything but wispy and mildly cheerful. Not so with Hershey’s formations. At any moment, the sky could open up, not as at the beginning of a storm but at the end. Her clouds are in a hurry; they’ve struck their lightning and heaved their rains, but in their passing they may shower again.

In this latest work, she’s added another element: a network of horizontal lines appears in front of the clouds, so that you feel you’re looking at the heavens through Venetian blinds. Although I was struck by the technical mastery required to superimpose the lines on the clouds — there’s a strange, cinematic precision to each of these frames — I wasn’t sure why I needed the mediating grid, especially since the blinds don’t appear to be closing.

Also not to be missed in the back room of the gallery are a half-dozen new works of enamel on aluminum. Henry Samelson’s colorful, abstract paintings somehow manage to pack the silliness of cartoons and the seriousness of gambling casinos. In each of these controlled, kinetic works, tiny, bright chips appear to be falling into tall piles. Who knows what they are? Money? Manna? Despite their enigmatic quality, the stakes seem high.

"Dense: Mary Boochever, Matt Harle, Jay Swift, Malcolm Wright"

At Genovese Sullivan Gallery, 23 Thayer Street in Boston, through March 30.

"Nona Hershey: Measuring Time"

At Miller Block Gallery, 14 Newbury Street in Boston, through March 31.