This week in Newly Reviewed, Will Heinrich covers Raoul De Keyser’s elegance, Nicola Tyson’s camp sincerity, Susan Fortgang’s bright geometry and Dietmar Busse’s uncanny New York.

Chelsea

Raoul De Keyser

Through March 1. David Zwirner, 519 West 19th Street and 525 West 19th Street, Manhattan; 212-517-8677, davidzwirner.com.

The Belgian artist Raoul De Keyser (1930-2012) didn’t start painting seriously until he was in his mid-30s, and when he did, it was with a light hand. The broad selection of paintings in “Raoul De Keyser: Touch Game,” which covers most of his career, includes many sparing arrangements of delicate marks that look like high-concept game boards. Some divide blocks of green with white lines, like soccer fields; others evoke views through microscopes, or high-speed photographs of physics experiments. A cloud of blushy marks, in “Front” (1992), looks like a vigorously erased test paper.

What it all has in common is that it’s technical without being inaccessible. You don’t need any expertise in color or paint application to appreciate that De Keyser was doing something small scale, elegant and specific to his medium.

Take “Come on, play it again nr. 2,” in which nine oblong blots of blue, orange or grayish pink, most of them horizontal, float across the top of an off-white canvas. Because De Keyser has so distilled the basic mechanisms of painting — the setting up of relationships among colors and shapes — they seem to pass directly into your brain. You can’t help feeling that with nine colored teardrops he has built a self-sufficient world.

Chelsea

Nicola Tyson

Through Feb. 22. Petzel, 520 West 25th Street, Manhattan; 212-680-9467, petzel.com.

The people in Nicola Tyson’s terrific new paintings are alive. Intuitive figures that the British painter most often renders in an electric shade of pink, they look more like half-formed dolls made of Silly Putty than they do like conventional figurative anatomy.

But whether they are in a naked huddle, as if for a commemorative photo (“The Group”); in an intense clutch (“The Embrace”); or even taking the form of a preening, melting Venus on the half-shell (“The Leftovers)”, they practically wink and giggle in their eagerness to catch your eye.

It’s all the more striking because their own eyes are ostensibly blank, mere circles that Tyson leaves alone after her initial base coat of color. They’re like the eyeholes cut into a mask or a child’s ghost costume, drawing expression only from their context and your expectations.

Tyson’s paintings involve so much play, though, so much put-on, so much self-consciousness and performance and camp sincerity, that the empty eyes also become dynamic portals of action and exchange. They remind you that what’s really human is what happens between us — and that goes for their belly buttons, too.

Noho

Susan Fortgang

Through March 1. Eric Firestone Gallery, 40 Great Jones Street, Manhattan; 646-998-3727, ericfirestonegallery.com.

Though Susan Fortgang has shown her art intermittently since getting an M.F.A. at Yale in 1968, and was included in “Pattern Painting,” an influential group show at P. S. 1 in 1978, “The Spaces in Between” at Eric Firestone Gallery is her first official solo exhibition. It includes a couple of large, gestural abstract paintings from the 1960s, but since the late ’70s, Fortgang has been using rules, grids, tape and thick layers of acrylic paint to make brightly colored, geometric works that look very much like textiles.

In “Signal,” probably my favorite piece, the motif is a kind of metastasized plaid, with two thick double bars of bluish-black running straight down the middle. Thinner bars of turquoise, red, white and golden yellow, along with deftly positioned painterly drips, combine to explosive effect, because it’s all just a little too much to parse. And when you approach the painting for a closer look, you discover that grooved layers of impasto make the texture plaid, too.

Brooklyn

Dietmar Busse

Through Feb. 16. Amant, 315 Maujer Street, Brooklyn; 212-918-1077, amant.org.

These days the photographer Dietmar Busse makes otherworldly compositions by painting developer directly onto photo paper with a brush. But “Fairytales 1991-1999” at Amant is an in-depth and exciting look at his earlier, more conventional photographs.

Black-and-white images of a mythologized, somewhat uncanny New York, they have more than a little Diane Arbus in them. Busse shoots a Central Park matron in her Easter Sunday best and backstage fashion models in the direst depths of heroin chic. Busse parts from Arbus, though, in his open, vulnerable, nonjudgmental eye. You never feel as if he was just looking for pictures. He was looking at human beings while they looked back at him.

Last Chance

Upper East Side

Forrest Bess

Through Jan. 31. Franklin Parrasch Gallery, 19 East 66th Street, Manhattan; 212-246-5360, franklinparrasch.com.

Two abstract painters flirted extra closely with Carl Jung’s belief that we can gain access to an ancient unconscious through legible symbols. One, Jackson Pollock, made 83 drawings as part of treatment with his analyst, who later sold them, leading to their exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Forrest Bess was the other Jungian, and now Franklin Parrasch Gallery sidesteps a similar ethical betrayal by exhibiting 11 of his paintings from the estate of the psychiatrist Dr. Jack Weinberg, who treated Bess but purchased these paintings outside the medical context.

A designer of camouflage during World War II whose waking visions and obsession with ancient hermaphroditism overtook his life and practice, Bess (1911-77) lived on the Gulf Coast of Texas, where he caught shrimp for a living. Eventually he also caught the interest of Pollock’s dealer in New York, Betty Parsons.

The pictures on view in this show, “Jack Was My First Collector,” all from 1946, catch him at a transitional moment in the years before showing with Parsons. Several postcard-size, densely textured harbor scenes and still lifes recall a hastier Arthur Dove. Bess hadn’t yet found the semaphoric, sexually charged symbolism for which he is better known, two examples of which are in the Museum of Modern Art’s group show “Vital Signs.”

Two larger abstractions are primed with coats of black. Bess cut shapes into the wet surface, as a cave man might jab clay. One canvas holds a central cluster of round forms, surrounded by a grid of falling C’s, a zigzag bolt, a stick stacked with planks. These ghost lines come to life with flecks of color: blue in the rain, reddened lightning, the signpost in indigo.

Consciousness? Weather? It’s hard to know, but Bess seems to be excavating some message from the sleep of history. More studious than Cy Twombly’s work and more earnest than Basquiat’s, Bess’s experiments tease us with a suspicion that formal abstraction tried to shoo off: Markings want to explain their makers. WALKER MIMMS

Chinatown

Emily Janowick

Through Feb. 8. Parent Company, 154 East Broadway, Manhattan; 929-324-6615, parentcompany.net.

Two giant obelisks are currently wedged into Parent Company’s basement space for a show called “Wet Blanket.” They’re crossed in a tidy X, as if they’d fallen perfectly — one between two structural columns and the other on top. A pointed obelisk tip juts into the gallery’s doorway, a bit menacing, but its sharpness is allayed by the sounds of rolling and crashing waves.

Emily Janowick makes sculptures and site-specific installations that try to bridge the built and natural environments. A more accurate word for her work may be “interventions” — as when, in 2022, she filled a gallery with a staircase so big that you could only either climb it (and see the vines growing at the top) or walk beneath it.

In this exhibition, the wood obelisks, which Janowick constructed on site, restrict your movement. You can walk around, under or over them, but you can’t avoid them. The sculptures have transducers inside that play simultaneous audio recordings of the oceans on two coasts: Janowick recorded in Malibu, Calif., and her friend James Chrzan recorded in Kure Beach, N.C.

The installation is an astute conceptual gesture: two fallen monuments marking the turmoil of the country that stretches from sea to shining sea. But for me, at least, the show’s greater power is in its visceral effect. If you touch the obelisks, you can feel their vibrations. I laid down on one (with permission) and closed my eyes, and for a moment I could picture the crumbling of empires, replaced by the replenishment of the earth. JILLIAN STEINHAUER

Tribeca

Leroy Johnson

Through Feb. 8. Margot Samel, 295 Church Street, Manhattan; 212-597-2747, margotsamel.com.

Leroy Johnson (1937-2022) lived and worked in Philadelphia his whole life. While employed as a social worker, educator and at other jobs, Johnson, who was largely self-taught, made paintings, sculptures, collages and photographs. He exhibited his art, and learned from and mentored other artists. And though he called himself an outsider, in his hometown he was also an insider — or, as one curator said, “a constant heartbeat” within the local scene.

The heartbeat of Black, urban Philadelphia was the subject of much of Johnson’s work, including the 16 sculptures gathered here for his first exhibition in New York. They are miniature houses of a kind — not one measures more than two feet in any direction — but calling them that feels too tidy. They are patchwork structures made from wood, ceramic, cardboard, plastic and more — maquettes for buildings that seem designed less to house life than to manifest it.

The sculptures are intricate and surprising: Images lurk inside hard-to-see internal rooms; pink feathers and photographic pigeons adorn a roof (“Crosswalk,” circa 2000-5); an entire back wall is a ceramic cast of a face (“Heart of Darkness,” circa 1995-2000). Textual and visual references to Black society abound, including historical figures, everyday people, weathered facades and funerals.

Johnson collected material from the streets of Philadelphia and used it to render the emotional reality of those streets. His works are dynamic and complex puzzles; the pieces seem like they shouldn’t fit together, but improbably and intuitively, they do. JILLIAN STEINHAUER

More to See

East Village

Theresa Duncan, Cory Arcangel, Oliver Payne

Through Feb. 22. Smilers, 431 East 6th Street, Manhattan; 646-389-0884, smilers.nyc.

This new basement gallery from the artist-curators Laura Tighe and Mark Beasley is currently set up as a 1990s childhood fantasyland, with unusual video games glowing from cathode-ray-tube computer and TV monitors.

On one you can play “Chop Suey” (1995), an interactive storybook-like game for girls created by Theresa Duncan with Monica Gesue. Click around a hand-drawn map of tiny Cortland, Ohio, to query a fortune teller, grab food at the local Chinese restaurant and listen to the poetic ramblings of a loquacious moon. The adventures just keep coming. It’s a dreamy, multifarious work, with charismatic illustrations by the musician Ian Svenonius, music by Brendan Canty (of the post-hardcore band Fugazi) and narration by the writer David Sedaris. The only objective here is to wander, completely free.

Mario, though — the famous plumber and ubiquitous video game star — is far from free. Instead, in a 2003 classic that Cory Arcangel made by hacking a Nintendo cartridge that’s plugged in nearby, he is onscreen and stuck atop a block. A blue sky surrounds him, and he can look only left and right as he awaits a savior that will never arrive.

An adjacent room holds a vintage-looking, black-and-white shoot ’em up, “Crust Shmup,” which Oliver Payne released last year. My fighter jet kept getting destroyed in vicious dogfights, almost immediately, until I learned (spoiler alert) that pacifism promotes survival.

Surprises abound in this show — joy, too. Museums should take it as a model. Instead of hosting inane digital spectacles to draw new audiences, why not try something like this? ANDREW RUSSETH

Chelsea

Mark Leckey

Through Feb. 15. Gladstone Gallery, 530 West 21st Street, Manhattan; 212-206-7606, gladstonegallery.com.

Eight years after his deliriously inventive MoMA PS1 survey, the freethinking, genre-eluding British artist Mark Leckey is finally back in town with a new show, “3 Songs From the Liver.” Ecstasy (spiritual, emotional and physical), a rare subject in contemporary art, is its focus, and a sequence of three topsy-turvy videos from the past few years is its heart.

In the best one, Leckey loops and remixes a 2017 viral video of a man smashing through a bus-stop window one (presumably boozy) night in Cardiff, Wales. Leckey’s piece plays on two screens in, no joke, a bus stop inside the gallery: a mise-en-abyme of hooliganism. Higher-resolution footage made by the artist soon appears of a man similarly catapulting through a window. “Oh my God, you did it!” a voice cries. Leckey distorts those lines and brings in shimmering electronic music. As this brave, stupid jump repeats again, and again, and again, a bizarre sublimity wells up.

The artist, who is 60, is himself being transported in “Carry Me Into the Wilderness” (2022), which plays nearby. Wandering in a sylvan London park after the pandemic lockdown, he found himself overcome, and hit record on his cellphone. “Everything just fills me up and it’s too much, and it’s too great,” he says over blurry images, his voice quavering before it passes through filters that render it expansive, choral. Candles and a golden painting of a hermit’s cave (based on a Lorenzo Monaco piece from around 1400) soon transport us into the realm of religion.

Leckey’s own gold-leaf panels are also on view; one riffs on a city from a medieval painting that figures in the third video installation, “Mercy I Cry City” (2024). It plays behind a floor-to-ceiling wall, but it’s visible through small, oblique openings that recall squints, which allow churchgoers to glimpse an otherwise-obstructed altar. The video moves through a computer-generated rendering of the walled city, which is empty, oddly proportioned, unreal and out of reach. Soon everything is spinning, vanishing into light and then beginning again.

All these unlikely ecstatic experiences, these escapes, are fleeting — thrilling yet incomplete. But perhaps their effects accrue, which is art’s promise. They sneak up on you, or, like the Cardiff leaper, you pass through them. ANDREW RUSSETH

Tribeca

Roe Ethridge

Through March 1. Andrew Kreps Gallery, 22 Cortlandt Alley, Manhattan; 212-741-8849, andrewkreps.com.

As slop images generated by artificial intelligence pollute social-media feeds, Roe Ethridge’s photographic mischief feels at once quaint and refreshing. He commingles fashion shoots, apparent snapshots and seemingly staged compositions, which dodge classification as they tantalize. He challenges you to ascertain exactly what you are seeing.

The 20-odd recent pictures in “Shore Front Parkway” feature, among other subjects, a faint rainbow above nondescript beachfront apartment buildings, flower bouquets (in a pizza-sauce can, a copper pot, a translucent vase) and a basket of perfectly plump grapes. Corals and ambers are prominent, and a certain rustic-chic sensibility prevails. There are also famous female models, as there usually are: Irina Shayk grins as she tips a captain’s hat (Ethridge fans may recall it from a 2007 self-portrait), and the artist Anna Weyant leans out a window, looking down as if she is welcoming you back from war.

Ethridge, 55, has long delighted in inhabiting and tweaking clichés, courting questions about his sincerity while shrugging them off. One photo, “This Is Not a Cigarette” (2023), has a reclining woman in a black gown brandishing a long pipe painted to resemble a cigarette.

Like other all-American artists, including John F. Peto and John Wesley, he portrays people and things that we think we know with impish élan and candor, beguiling even as he confesses. Look at the tiny, heartbreaking blemishes on those luscious grapes. Look closer at Weyant’s gaze. It just may be passing over your shoulder, to someone else. ANDREW RUSSETH

Nolita

Carroll Cloar

Through Feb. 15. Andrew Edlin Gallery, 212 Bowery, Manhattan; 212-206-9723, edlingallery.com.

A warm New York welcome to Carroll Cloar (1913-93), the Arkansas lithographer who, discovering color in 1940s Mexico, settled in Memphis to conjure the American South in muted and mystical pointillist paintings.

Long a trophy of regional collections, and an off-view secret in those of New York, where he spent some of the 1930s, Cloar has had no solo show here for 35 years. These six paintings on Masonite and eight pencil studies flaunt his poetic devotion to landscape. In “Sunday Morning” (1969), dry-scraped grasses and dotted weeds line the dirt road like aerosol droplets. An angular red okra plant and a wall of stippled foliage dominate “Charlie Mae Looking for Little Eddie” (1969).

The environment is as finely detailed as the protagonists who seem to accept their roles within it: the parishioners filing down that weedy lane toward church, the girl coaxing a stray goat from those bushes.

The result is a secondhand, jury-rigged sort of realism, not the social kind we more readily attribute to Eldzier Cortor, or other contemporaries who dealt plainly with the cotton fields and Black provinciality of Southern oral history. Cloar worked from photo albums and childhood memory, and he painted what it feels like to recall being told a story.

One well-chosen pair of works indicates Cloar was doing his memory thing in conscious opposition to Surrealism. His autobiographical “Mama, Papa is Blessed” (1960) satirizes the French painter Yves Tanguy’s “Mama, Papa is Wounded,” while Cloar’s “Pale Hose, Pale Writer” (1960), named to play on Katherine Anne Porter’s novella “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” expresses a painterly absurdism: The White Sox batter at the center of Cloar’s panel, his cheek bulging with chew, turns it into a trolling pun about America’s favorite sport. WALKER MIMMS

Lower East Side

Jorge Camacho

Through Feb. 15. François Ghebaly, 391 Grand Street, Manhattan; 646-559-9400, ghebaly.com.

The Cuban artist and poet Jorge Camacho (1934-2011) had professional success during his lifetime, exhibiting in galleries, at the 1967 Salón de Mayo in Havana and at the 1986 Venice Biennale. However, his work hasn’t been seen much in the United States. This exhibition, “Five Paintings at Dusk,” offers a fascinating introduction.

Camacho was a late Surrealist who first encountered the movement as a teenager in postwar Cuba. He was studying law but gave it up to become a painter. In 1959, he got a scholarship from his country’s new revolutionary government to go to Paris, where he met André Breton, Surrealism’s ringleader. Breton took an interest in Camacho, who ended up staying in Paris until he died.

Camacho’s art has some of the hallmarks of traditional Surrealism, namely biomorphic forms filling nebulous landscapes. But his compositions feel more classical, centered on vertical and horizontal axes that are marked by pillars and poles — albeit shot through with bones and body parts.

Suggestions of violence abound, not least in the spikes and fire, which are likely references to political repression in Cuba. The biggest work, “The Scissors” (1973), looks like it could be an abstracted medieval torture tableau; the others evoke occult rituals and societies.

Perhaps what’s most striking is Camacho’s palette. As the “dusk” in the show’s title suggests, the works, all made between 1969 and 1974, are suffused with glowing and fleshy pinks, muted and earthy greens: a soft counterpoint to the brutal imagery. The paintings are visions of a world in twilight, both literally and as a more existential knell. JILLIAN STEINHAUER

See the December gallery shows here.