"Salon"

One sure mark of a good piece of art is that it tempts the viewer to touch it. Unfortunately, we usually only encounter art in museums and galleries, where the alarm goes off if you get too near (once, at an exhibition of Jacques Lipchitz sculptures, the frustration of this got the better of me and I had to plead for mercy with the guards.) Some art awakens entirely different desires, compelling the viewer instead to talk about it, to stare at it, to look away from it, to imitate it or to think about it. The work by Museum School and Harvard students now showing in the Adams House Art Space goes straight to the fingertips.

Thematically divergent, these carefully hand-crafted works have in common a certain highly wrought quality. The artists seem to share a concern for each piece as a made object, for the physicality of their media and for the creation of new effects by the manipulation of materials. Benjamin Cotham's paintings of faces, overglazed many times over by layers of semi-transparent black paint, demonstrate the pay-off of this awareness. His invention of a new way to treat paint allows him to make terrifically eerie pieces; as with a hologram, the image is only visible from certain angles and in certain lights.

Garnette Hall's work in varnished-over chocolate and cake gel on canvas was the most difficult to keep my hands off; the surface seems to be encrusted with half-molten gemstones. Similarly, Jessica Golbus '99 also starts with a canvas but then adds texture instead of paint, covering the surface with strips of screen, splintering boards and an old shirt.

Although Elina Mer '00 works out her paintings from family photographs, they have no trace of photorealist coldness, but instead are painterly and lyrical, made of skillful and confident strokes.

Deborah Wojcik's paintings of small boys are set apart from the other pieces by their neatly stylized, almost commercial execution; they are a smart treatment of issues of self-presentation that are usually seen only in the feminine inflection. Like most any group show, "Salon" is uneven and loose; however, it contains samples of compelling, skillful and surprisingly mature work.

Now through Dec. 18 in the Adams House Art Space.

Fri. 6-10 p.m.; Sat. 2-4 p.m. and 6-8 p.m.