Downtown

The swift gestural line that Elaine Towns uses to draw female figures is aggressive and raw. It carves out breasts and calves, yet also scars them with a brute power akin to Willem de Kooning’s abstract female nudes. The crude energy of the figures makes a sharp contrast to the cool geometry of the surrounding hard-edge shapes painted in thin, scumbled, sometimes luminous color.

Small paintings on newsprint emphasize Towns’ Cubist roots just as the painting “Woman Ascending Stairs” makes a reference to the action in Duchamp’s staircase-descending nude. In another untitled oil-on-linen painting, the artist pushes that movement further as the brushy figure seems to twist or spin amid a space tumbled with increasingly geometric abstract forms that hold it in place. The strength of this figure in particular is itself generating dynamism that merges with, yet defies dissolution in the surrounding space.

Photographer Joel Leivick in the next gallery makes stark and haunted images of the Italian landscape. His pictures of quarries, mountains and small towns capture more than just the lay of the land. They describe something of the dry, rubble-strewn monumentality of places like Carrara and Pitigliano, however. At these sites workers are dwarfed by the stone they quarry, and buildings or trucks read like toys on distant winding mountain roads. Leivick bleaches every black-and-white image to the pale, white-washed luminosity of alabaster by letting mist or the glare of sunlight on naked rock find suitable compatibility in the light grays of the print. (Koslow Rayl Gallery, 2538 W. 7th St., to Dec. 31.)