Just as Neo-Expressionism has turned the figure...

Just as Neo-Expressionism has turned the figure into a twisted symbol of Angst and the dog into a baying mutt with electrified hair, the movement has transformed landscape into a potentially horrific place, charged with ominous undertones and penetrated by eerie light.

A current case in point is the inspired pairing of Louisa Chase’s paintings and Robert Lobe’s sculpture. On its own, Lobe’s hammered aluminum tree trunks, rocks and logs might look quite benign, but coupled with Chase’s romantic unrest, they too seem spiritually possessed. The craggy, fragmented forms in both groups of work play off each other to produce the visionary atmosphere of a forest where hulking trees are uprooted, precipices descend abruptly into an unseen abyss and bodies are swept away by the forces of wind, fire and dreams.

Lobe shows 11 metal pieces covering 10 years of work. They range from relatively small root and rock forms to the huge (roughly nine-foot-square) pile of hollow logs called “Lands End at Mushaboom.” His closest aesthetic kin are 19th-Century painters from the Hudson River School. For all the sculptures’ straightforward admission of process and artifice (seen in their hollowness as well as in exposed bolts and overlapping sheets), a sense of grandeur and morality seeps in through the cracks.

Chase’s work takes a comic turn, vaguely reminiscent of Philip Guston’s late work, when she sets pairs of black, outlined feet on pink, star-shaped cliffs. More frequently, it has an apocalyptic edge, as when figures are cast into swirling flames, or red-violet clouds start to look like ravenous beasts bearing down on an intense center of yellow light. There’s no easy way to account for the appeal of this overheated work. It could probably get by on energy alone, but Chase knows better than to stop at that. She really paints these canvases with a combination of pigment and guts. (Margo Leavin Gallery, 817 N. Hilldale Ave., to May 11.)