David Ambrose invests the simplest of materials, watercolor and paper, with unexpected richness. Drawing from ornamental designs in stonework and lace, and from such sources as the resplendent rose windows found in cathedrals throughout Europe, Ambrose pierces his paper in a filigree of pattern before putting paint to it. As in the large-scale Southeastern Elevation, the result is a densely worked surface, a harmonic brocade of color and texture with intertwined threads of historic, spiritual and personal reference.

Drawing from history, but on an intimate scale, Maureen Mullarkey creates collages from the pages of old books and diaries. Each layered composition, sometimes composed with legible words or almost decipherable phrases, is a small reservoir of cultural memory. “Gutenberg Elegies,” she calls them. We may not recognize the specific circumstances they represent, but we understand them. Without wanting to ascribe more than the artist intended, I would venture that the strong horizontals in Mullarkey’s work, such as On the Sound, give them a topographic character as well. Never mind that many of these works are barely larger than the size of your hand, they suggest abundant fields or rolling hills to be traversed and explored with the mind, much as the original volumes might have.

The large, often monumental paintings of Rainer Gross typically come two by two. Gross is the creator of a unique process in which two separate surfaces—one layered with dried pigment, the other with icing-thick oil paint—are pressed together and, after a time, pulled apart. The paintings that result, such as Hutton Twins (the artist pulls the names at random from the Manhattan phone book), are more-or-less mirror twins, both original, for neither could exist without the other. While the process is intriguing, it is the fulsome color—heavily pigmented, saturated, with velvety flakes that bring the surface almost into relief—that intoxicates.

Tim McFarlane’s luxe is in his layers. Each of his paintings is a dense net of lattices that fall loosely over one another. In All That Could Be, a large rectangle of luscious tangles that could heat a room by hue alone, the eye works hard to peer around and through the layers. Speaking formally about his work, McFarlane says he’s exploring “aspects of aggregation and negation through color, line, mark-making and brushwork.” Speaking informally, I would say that the endless pleasure I have experienced in this work comes from allowing myself to become, and to remain, visually enmeshed.