FRANCESCO CLEMENTE: Portraits
Mary Boone Gallery

Over the decades, one of Francesco Clemente’s most frequent themes has been himself, depicted over and over again in his distinctive East-meets-West, stream-of-consciousness fashion. Less well known are the portraits of artists, poets, and actors he produced over the same years. More recently he has turned to a comparatively buttoned-up group of subjects — luminaries of the New York art world, mostly eminent collectors and museum officials. Sixteen of those commissioned portraits, all produced since 1999, currently fill the walls at Mary Boone.

Does painting financiers and CEOs crimp the style of a painter known for erotic, hallucinatory imagery? At Boone, the self-possession of his subjects, all attired in dress clothes, suggests that his inventiveness has been constrained in respectful directions.

All 16 paintings are nearly 8 feet wide and horizontal, with portraits of couples filling oval canvases, and single subjects occupying rectangular ones. In each of them, upper bodies are posed frontally and impassively on uniform backgrounds of mostly pastel hues. Faces, deftly modeled from blended tones, tend to have bird like aspects, with over-sized, glassy eyes. The most exotic elements of these images, however, are the twisting lower bodies of every female subject; each woman’s figure curls until legs and high-heel-clad feet project vertically into the air, demonstrating a feline flexibility quite at odds with the upright torsos.

Individual personalities show in their accessories: Shelley Aarons sports a skull-and-bones necklace, Kent Logan a yellow, fish-patterned tie. More intriguing, though, are the moments of suggestive modeling. Curls of fur trim surrounding Princess Firyal of Jordan lend her a statuesque presence, while Lisa Jackson strikes an imperious note with squared shoulders and tight-set lips.

Mr. Clemente’s paintings have always had an illustrational aspect, relying more on gatherings of suggestive allusions rather than the pictorially weighted observations one finds in Matisse. For some of these canvases, the meandering limbs seem to have been simply appended to what started out as fairly standard portraits. The uniformity of format, too, makes for a certain monotony, which is leavened only slightly by an unusual installation placing canvases alternately high and low on the walls. For me, the mystical undertones of the show boiled down to questions on the order of: What happened to the Princess’s other spike heel?

Until June 30 (541 W. 24th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-752-2929).

HARVEY QUAYTMAN: The Rust Paintings
McKee Gallery

Piet Mondrian, a lover of jazz and an avid dancer, proved that a severe approach can yield highly lyrical results. In some ways, the “rust” paintings by Harvey Quaytman (1937–02) at McKee are even more regulated. With a single exception, all 12 canvases have square designs of vertical and horizontal bars, symmetrical about the level axes, with lines forming a Greek cross at the exact center. Almost all are restricted to a palette of black, white, rust-colored hues, and a pinkish burnt sienna.

Quaytman certainly had an eye for plastic tensions. A painting like “Stretcher” (1990) shows a vigorous inversion of rhythms as the eye moves from left to right, from solid interiority to taut containment. At left, a stabile horizontal of medium darks floats on a field of cool white. It barely penetrates the right half, where it locates the core of an abrupt expansion of warm whites, hemmed only by the black perimeter at the canvas edges. As with many of the paintings here, the counterbalancing of tensions is so dynamic that one startles to recognize its beginnings in a slender, rust-colored crossing at center.

Within such restrictions of style the artist finds a remarkable variety of expression. While “Stretcher” consists mostly of off-white expanses, “Space Heater” (1993) contains none at all. Here small notes of light scarlet pin down large rust-colored planes extending to black and tan borders. In “Full Day, Pompeii” (1991), equally-weighted areas of black, white, and sienna intertwine in a dense, squared knot.

Up close, these paintings’ rusthued areas — created by adding iron filings to a water-based acrylic medium — have a delicately granular surface of shifting brownish-oranges. Ridges of paint attest to substantial reworkings of many of the designs; in some places, the artist appears to have painted solid colors over areas of rust particles.

Besides adding a resonant depth to his compositions, the iron filings also, one imagines, introduced an element of chance that sparked the intense play of forms. At various points in his career, Quaytman experimented with other textural effects and with shaped canvases, but this selection of work presents the artist to full advantage, showing a wondrous directness of intention that never descends to mere calculation.

Until June 20 (745 Fifth Ave., between 57th and 58th streets, 212-688-5951).