Light shows Moving pictures from George Nick and Ralph Hamilton BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS

Maybe the most refreshing aspect of George Nick’s show at Gallery NAGA — and there’s much to be delighted by in this recent work by one of Boston’s most accomplished painters — is his unapologetic exuberance. Nothing skeptical, ironic, or otherwise driven by cynicism affects Nick’s landscapes and city streets, his still lifes, or his one self-portrait here. They’re bright, they’re colorful, they’re frequently crowded, and they are, almost to the frame, drunk with light. The polish on an antique car’s fender, the tumult of windows and ledges, awnings and sandstone steps at some familiar Back Bay corner, a marsh and an open sky extending beyond a patchwork house in Beverly, all become opportunities for the play of light on a range of glistening and unreflective surfaces alike.

What Nick doesn’t paint, at least in this exhibit, is people. Even his self-portrait corroborates that claim, limited as it is to a disembodied, open-mouthed head that seems more decapitated than breathing. Yet his paintings register as if they were overrun with people. Taking as his subject matter homes and city streets and crafted objects contributes to that sense of human presence, but Nick delivers more — flesh-and-blood human beings feel proximate; their incipient presence goes far beyond the merely implied and anonymous. For all that no one’s to be seen shopping in his stores, shadowing the lawns of his houses, silhouetting their windows, or crossing an intersection on Newbury Street, you’re nevertheless left with the palpable impression that people are teeming just beyond each frame, that the emptiness of his stoops and yards and sidewalks is a momentary anomaly about to be corrected, like the moment before the movie director yells "Action" on a set.

Nick pulls off that effect in part by allowing for another kind of drunkenness, skewering the angles and planes at which his objects come together so that even the most stolid brownstone, the weightiest handrail, the most rectilinear set of toy railway cars appears vertiginous. A giddy kinetic sensibility informs these pictures, and it helps to explain why they seem so alive. They’re moving. The movement is subtle, however, almost insidious. Look closely at the rounded glass-and-cement DKNY storefront that dominates Katya’s Graduation @ Windsor (a personalized title that sidesteps the potential consumerism of painting a clothing retailer’s outlet). Notice how the sidewalk pitches slightly upward from the street, how the adjacent window framed by the orange-colored store to the left looks as if it were about to cave inward, how whatever those darkened windows belong to across the street in the right section of the frame leans as severely as the bell tower at Pisa. Everything is normal, placid, middle-class, and spiffy; yet the entire scene suffers from acute vertigo.

So too with G-Spa II, wherein the shadows that fall across the steps leading to some Newbury Street salon begin to look like a winding staircase between the decks of a ship. To the right of the steps, a dark door at ground level appears to be opening inward; you realize, however, that it’s shut and that the brightly reflective window above it isn’t actually flush with the door, much as they belong to the same building and the same vertical plane. It’s as though we were being reminded that for all the charm and peace and grace of our signature Victorian edifices, in reality everything is topsy-turvy, unbalanced, out of whack.

One reason The Simpsons is such a sharp political and social commentary is that the cartoon characters can get away with transgressions that no human actor would be allowed. There’s an analogous cartoon quality to Nick’s paintings, a happy-go-lucky cheerfulness born of light and color and subject matter that permits him to make some otherwise troubling points. You can’t look at a frame of his without imagining that it’s two or three times larger than its actual dimensions. That’s particularly true of his city scenes and landscapes. G-Spa II wants to extend vertically and horizontally far beyond itself. Everything we see in the picture is a fraction of something larger; every detail is a part of something we’re not able to see entirely. The upper stories of the buildings, the surrounding sidewalks and vestibules, even the shadows are incomplete. This intense and deliberate cropping makes us acutely aware of the abundance of what we’re taking in — information abounds in every square inch of a Nick painting. But we’re made equally and simultaneously aware of how much we’re missing. No tidy overviews, no smooth resolutions, no bilateral symmetry; we can see all right, but we can’t know. The same phenomenon is at work in one of the smallest paintings in the show, a 16-by-20-inch close-up of the front of an antique car. Stand near Bentley and it’s almost indecipherable; back away and its glistening contours become the chrome and glass and metal curves of the classic Depression-era automobile.

Perhaps the most unsettling work in the exhibit — it is, unfortunately, poorly reproduced both in the show’s lackluster catalogue and on NAGA’s Web site — is the 2002 oil-on-linen Approaching Storm. Gone are many of Nick’s visual tropes: the space is leisurely and open, right angles connect properly at 90 degrees, and the subject matter, not unprecedented in the artist’s œuvre but not commonplace either, is a relatively ordinary turn-of-the-century gabled house whose lawn and hedges are dappled with snow. It’s hard to pinpoint the allure of Approaching Storm — the multiple sharp shadows cast by the one leafless tree across the various planes of the building; the frail, diminished February light that makes any visibility seem precious; the careful dignity of the unremarkable structure — beyond recognizing what it shares with all of George Nick’s work, a shameless celebration of the sensual, material world.

A larger show of Nick’s paintings is on display at the Concord Art Association through December 23. After that, an amalgam of the two exhibits will travel the East Coast in 2005.

EVEN THOUGH THEY’RE BOTH older than 50 and live in the Greater Boston area, it’s hard to imagine a painter less like George Nick than Ralph Hamilton, whose exhibit at the Kidder Smith Gallery marks his first solo appearance in Boston in a decade. Whereas a painting by George Nick seems as unpremeditated as birdsong in spring, a painstaking self-consciousness marks Hamilton’s art, beginning with his obsessive style. Hamilton applies his paint horizontally (and my guess would be from left to right) in thin, tiny strokes. The result is that every image looks as though it were passing by in a speeding train; at each moment, they’re reminders of fleetingness and ephemerality.

The pictures of course aren’t moving, and because they’re both stationary and blurred, each image appears separated from the viewer by a watery or dusty veil, like a television broadcast from the moon. And for all the distinct subtlety of his style and his subject matter (Hamilton’s imagery is based on photographs, many of them of cultural icons like Joe DiMaggio, Montgomery Clift, and JFK), he may prove more confrontational than Nick in making us acknowledge the limits of seeing. The veil wants perpetual penetrating; to look at a Hamilton painting is to have to look repeatedly, as if through study or a sudden jerk of the head clarity might kick in. If Nick entices his viewers by the light-drenched objects he puts forward, Hamilton seduces by what he disallows. Seeing his work reminded me of a cell-phone call in a dead zone: crucial syllables are missing, you’re not sure what’s being said, what’s funny, how much to take seriously. His work is disturbing.

The disturbance doesn’t end there, however. If George Nick is about celebrating the sensual and the material, Ralph Hamilton is about dissecting the proximity of the sensual to the cruel. Two large, chilling paintings dominate the show; both are done in colors reminiscent of crayon or cotton candy whereas their subject matter is casually sinister. In one, a man whose eyes have been masked by the kind of black band a censor might apply to a porn image appears to be entering a room. On the other side of the room, an adult sits gagged and blindfolded and bound to a chair. One doesn’t want to imagine the scene that’s about to be enacted. In an adjacent and similarly sized painting (each is six square feet), a girl lies draped across a large bed. Something about her turned-in head and the indistinct redness in the vicinity of her nose makes her prone position seem ominous.

The disturbing resonance of the two paintings is great. In one, terror looms. In the other, a sickening ambiguity holds sway as we’re invited to look up a girl’s skirt while she lies bleeding. Unfortunately, the titles of the two works pigeonhole their otherwise resonant and gripping imagery. Electrocution of a Negro and Shot Twice During a Robbery straitjacket these paintings’ power, tidily packaging material that’s neither tidy nor easily understood.

"George Nick: New Paintings"

At Gallery NAGA, 67 Newbury Street in Boston, through December 18.

"Ralph Hamilton: New Paintings"

At Kidder Smith Gallery,131 Newbury Street in Boston, through November 27.