DOWNTOWN

Nancy Macko has a way with water. She can picture it clear and reflective, sloshing, still or near solid, and yet never get caught being picturesque. She achieves this in spite of a penchant for pretty pastel color. What knocks the paintings away from sweet and into gutsy is Macko’s ability to swing paint around with a vengeance.

Each painting contains several panels or patched-together fragments of abstract imagery. Most intriguing are the paintings like “Cycle of Change,” where thick, vertical blue stripes dissolve into a peach ground bracketed by gray watery mists. Stripes come up repeatedly in other paintings and make a potent visual formula the artist wields with assurance. She can make the stripes flat and unyielding barriers into the painting’s depths or strangely evocative lines that recall tall grasses, flames, or the side of old buildings. Laid horizontally they have the feel of a Jasper Johns flag painting and turn the works into nationalistic proclamations of territory. This kind of allusion, coming as it does from such an uncomplicated element, is part of the work’s intrigue--a painting’s depth is obviously a layered metaphor. (Double Rocking G Gallery, 652 Mateo St., to June 11.)