GALLERIES

20 Pucker Safrai, #171

Pucker-Safrai is fond of this Spanish-born artist; he has had 5 shows here over the past 6 years. The two series presently on exhibit, "Folklore" and "Circus," justify the gallery's committment; Kieff proves himself a master of polished bronze. The "Folklore" works, like tales, sweep through time and space. Symbolic continuums of metal, they demand time to trace their complex curves and planes, yet unify their motion in abstract patterns which seem as natural, yet are as carefully structured, as plot elements in a folk tale (three brothers, wicked step-mothers). "Ciecus" is more subtly rooted in both reality and bronze. The forms play with composition and abstraction, juggling shapes. Never too sentimental, or too serious, Kieff is a practiced performer.

22 Nielsen, #179

Harvey Quaytman, paintings and drawings, through Nov. 6. Charcoal and acrylic on board can be trendy mixed-media creations, but Quatyman's remain intellectual works. His simple geometric forms seem to move the color over the surface; the result is harmonious, one grasps it all at once--yet not static. Like a frozen waterfall, these paintings hold arrested motion that is just waiting to escape.

Michael Taylor's watercolor-and-pastels are billed as a new direction in American Realism. But his people are posed, his color imposed. Above all, his perception hasn't gotten past Norman Rockwell's cute kids and rehashed sentiment.

2 Shore Galleries, #8

(Off the map down Dartmouth St.)

Rolly-Michauux, 290 Dartmouth St. at the Vendome.

Thomas McKnight's landscapes are magic. Through his windows or the eyes of his birds, one can't quite tell what exists, or how. The only solid objects in "Spring Twilight Window" are the bars. McKnight's metaphysical "New England Valley"--which bears a striking resemblance to Harvard--is perhaps the most subtly intriging of all, a vision of a place dark and light, real and staged, at once.

Through Nov. 13.

18 Graphics 1 and 2, #168

Alex Katz, Recent Prints Katz, whose placid moose hangs at the Fogg these days, prints his impression of Maine and his family in quiet blocks of muted color. Not as confident in this medium as he is in paint, Katz restrains innovation--the prints are well-executed but their composure and balance rules out excitement.

21 Dolland Richards, #172

John C. Terelak paints better in watercolor than in oil. Works like "Purina", the best of the show, are soft, but solid realism. His oil and acrylic works, unfortunately, combine a common color scheme and consciously imposed light to no great effect. Through the end of the week.

Photographs in Between vision gallery, #216

Imogen Cunningham, through Nov. 6 Amazing photographs by an amazing woman. Cunningham's sensitivity to pattern, form and light, and her mastery of photographic technique, make ordinary rocks into intricate mysteries.

Kive, #231

"The Dark Horse of LIght" by Thomas Weir, Nov. 3--Dec. 4

Weir doesn't even call his pictures photographs, but photographics. More mystery, this time in the technical process, not in the conception. Silver bromides and cyanotypes sound like poison, but are merely, the initiated say, transforming photographic potions. What they will do to film's record of reality remains to be seen.

Panopticon, #69

David Avison and Jim Hudson, through Nov. 17

Realilstic scenes of life (birth, play, death), but there is no everyday banality to these photos. It's all in the way they've looked at it; the shot of birth from the rear, of kids around a pool at a three-foot high eye level.