Downtown

In his recent solar burn pieces, Jay McCafferty seems to be fiddling with the wattage in his delicate paper creations. Brownish or suntan-and-greenish surfaces reveal trademark sun-crisped holes and loose, peeling layers ranging in hue from faded periwinkle to orange and shell pink. When the burnt and shriveled areas are smaller and the surface of the paper is a pale, neatly pockmarked palimpsest (“Low Tide”), McCafferty’s strict engagement with the grid format takes center stage. Softer pieces with eaten-away layers edge into airy decorativeness. Ones with larger, ragged holes seem most emphatic about the impersonal nature of this child-of-nature process. It’s a limited technique, to be sure, but McCafferty works it over with the persistance of a Scarlatti turning out graceful refinements on the sonata form. (Cirrus Gallery, 542 S. Alameda St., to March 12.)