Summer flings Newbury Street delivers BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS
	"The Repetitive Mark" Gallery NAGA | 67 Newbury Street | through July 29 "Summer Invitational" Nielsen Gallery | 179 Newbury Street | through July 29 "Group Show" Barbara Krakow Gallery | 10 Newbury Street | through July 30 "Fine Choices" Pucker Gallery | 171 Newbury Street | through September 4

It’s not hard to complain about most group art exhibits. (I seem to do it every month.) The "themes" for bringing artists together are flimsy; too often the criterion is what’s in the file drawer or who hasn’t sold. Similar inattention marks the layout of such exhibits; if it fits the space, it works.

Over the years, however, a playfulness has infiltrated the summer group shows on Newbury Street. Candor supersedes pretense; relaxation trumps studied deliberateness; care and thoughtfulness reign. The best of the shows — and there are many — are like exquisite hors d’œuvre at a cocktail party. Maybe they’re intended as snack food, but it’s easy to pack in a real dinner.

The most coherent show I saw last week is at Gallery Naga. "The Repetitive Mark" represents the work of one furniture maker, John Eric Byers, and five abstract painters who share an obsession with repeating patterns — dots or grooves or lines or other designs. For Byers, it’s grooves. The artist incises the surface of his woodworking — on display is a wall-mounted cabinet and three squat, cylindrical stools — with cross-hatches or lines or circles. The mahogany surfaces are then painted with multiple layers of milk paint, browns and beiges beneath an overlay of buttery white. The effect is of lightly toasted almonds. You can almost taste them.

Masako Kamiya’s paintings take pointillism to a new level: each of the thousands of dots that populate her frames is built up with successive layers. Up close the whole suggests a skin condition — innumerable miniature warts. From a distance, mellifluent patterns emerge. Reese Inman flattens her dots of paint and will sometimes leave open spaces to set off the areas of her pinpoint precision. The result is a magical circuit board. You get the feeling that if they were plugged in, they’d make music.

Also of note at Naga are Jessie Morgan’s feathery, vertical, mixed-media works (imagine film stills of a hazy tidal pool), Janice Handleman’s sometimes hard-edged, sometimes watery gouaches, and Elizabeth Cheek’s densely dotted, multi-layered acrylics.

Integrity of a different, often figurative kind marks the group show at the Nielsen Gallery, where abstract sculpture co-exists with realistic drawings and bold abstractions in paint play off nearby wistful landscapes. David Reed’s #2, a 1972 work in oil, wax, and acrylic, is a dramatic vertical panel (76x38) that looks as if it had started life as a diptych. To the left, a red column and blue outcroppings appear against a pitch-black backdrop. To the right, what looks like the back view of a folding chair appears to be melting. A thin drizzle falls from its form down the length of the canvas. What’s identifiable disintegrates; what’s purely imaginative holds its ground.

Jake Berthot punctuates his textured, almost monochromatic surfaces with small epiphanies of light. Among the figurative artists, Anne Harris’s drawings — light yet decisive, psychologically complex yet unprepossessing — make you feel as if you were talking to her model. Look also for a haunting self-portrait by Gregory Gillespie as well as delicate, architectural watercolors by Christopher Wilmarth.

Portraits rule at the Barbara Krakow Gallery. Smartly set off in their own separate room are James (2004), a huge (69x54) Chuck Close silkscreen of the face of artist James Siena; Tina, programmer (2000), a medium-size (35x28) portrait by Julien Opie; and Tilda (2004), a more diminutive (16x12) oil by Alex Katz. All three artists are unabashed, energetic stylists: Close with his grid of big, watery, colorful droplets that coalesce into a human form; Opie with flattened, generic, comic-book outlines; Katz with casual, refined austerity. Together they give a short course in three generations of American portraiture.

Gripping too is the pair of Bill Thompson abstractions in acrylic urethane: polished, raised, monochromatic. The one in yellow could be a thick flower; the other suggests the facets of an impossible black gem. Kelly Sherman’s tender, mysterious, psychological dramas in mixed media (prints and gouache) deliver another surprise. The human forms have been stripped of all characteristics but their contours. Where there ought to be a body and face there’s nothing, as if they were the shadows on buildings after the bombing of Nagasaki. Sherman has made the leap from conceptually driven language-based work to compelling studies in alienation and loneliness.

The most ambitious and encompassing summer exhibit is at the Pucker Gallery, where 32 artists from at least four continents and working in diverse media — ceramics, oil, metal, wood — harmonize. The show succeeds in part because no contributor is restricted to a single work; many come in with a half-dozen or so. It isn’t a smorgasbord so much as a succession of main courses.

My first choice was the wall-mounted mobiles of Mark Davis. Against a backdrop of colorful, typically spherical shapes that attach to the wall, Davis extends thin wires that allow him to balance constellations of related forms that dip and turn, twist and spin, with the engrossing seriousness of genuine play. They reminded me of musical notations.

Crowding my Pucker plate was the ceramic work of Brother Thomas, Tatsuzo Shimaoka, and Shimaoka’s protegé Noriyasu Tsuchiya. Brother Thomas is one of the pre-eminent ceramic artists of our time — his work is in the permanent collections of Harvard’s Sackler Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. A large, squat blue vase, round as a stomach and flecked with orange and gold underglaze, would look bulky by anybody else. He adds to the surface two raised, rope-like lines that give the piece the momentum of an ebbing tide.

Tatsuzo Shimaoka, now 86 and a National Living Treasure of Japan, enjoys an analogous reputation on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. Whereas Brother Thomas’s trademark is the exquisite surfaces of his vessels and plates, Shimaoka regularly patterns the surface of his pottery with rope. Brother Thomas’s pottery belongs to the heavens, Shimaoka’s to the earth. Noriyasu Tsuchiya belongs to the tradition of his sensei, except that though the objects he makes are weighty, their surfaces are marked by smooth, quietly mottled, dreamy designs, as if to bridge heaven and earth.