"GREAT SKIES" By Josh Banaszak

Doubting Thomas Gallery is known for its cracked-out aesthetic. Several interior walls were stripped down to lathe and gaps years ago and have stayed that way. It's not a bad look, ringing true in the context of Tremont's only partly gentrified, still mean streets. The work on display tends to match, featuring samples of urban decay and personal trauma, falling somewhere between neo-dada and art brut, absurdity and angst. Only too willing to bash its way through polite fictions, sticking metaphorical fingers (or whatever) directly into the socket of some higher, harsher truth, the art can be amateurish or just too stoned to get off its butt.

On the other hand, sometimes it weaves around such limitations and turns out to be absolutely great. Painter Josh Banaszak's amazing canvases in his show, This Is a Test, are the real thing, not least because they do everything wrong, and care what we think like a pothole or a punch in the nose cares what we think. On a scale of one to 10, Banaszak's works forgot to take a number: They succeed in eluding the idea that they are paintings at all and just push to the head of the line.

The 20-odd paint-on-canvas or on-panel rectangles vary from small and skinny to big and fat. Colors tend to be straight out of the tube or the can, so there are broad swathes of vivid, crinkly alkyd green or blue or red. Banaszak has a young daughter named Beatrice whose painterly manner he is understandably in awe of. He confesses, even brags, that most of the paintings at This Is a Test are blatant imitations of her work. This is something that almost any painter with expressive ambitions will appreciate - Picasso wanted to be like a child, and for that matter Jesus said the same thing. But few pull it off.

Banaszak has it nailed. Take a work like "Great Skies." It's a typical kid's rainbow composition, bumpy colors arching dead center beneath a floppy white cloud and shreds of yellow that might be birds or spills or anything. Under the top layer of imagery, a bunch of dim parallel pencil lines run across the upper half and straight up and down on the bottom half. They seem like a reference to elementary school-issue ruled paper, but Banaszak says they're also a drawing of the board construction of his porch at home. It's worth noting that Banaszak is a carpenter by trade, with a 1999 arts degree from the Cleveland Institute of Art. Given that background, it's not implausible to hallucinate both building plans here, and even a shaky quotation of Canada's great minimalist painter Agnes Martin, known for her often almost invisible parallel lines. Words written in red paint are the artist's comments: "Things that belong in the sky, and some that don't."

Banaszak specializes in things that don't necessarily belong in a painting, at least not in close association. Like rebus-style pictograms unhooked from specific meaning, they add up to less, and more, than the sum of their parts. "Your ticket ... Your in ... really it can be" reads the legend brushed in black paint along the top yellow-painted margin of a smaller canvas. The rest of the horizontally oriented work is bright orange and its mysterious title reads "Fang vs Keyman." A vague, bluish shark's tooth-shaped stroke of paint is discernible on the left, and a blue skeleton key floats over toward the right. It would be unfair to try to figure this out - it just doesn't mean much of anything. But the way in which it disconnects from narrative significance is just plain cool. It's like watching electricity jump across a connection, just at the moment someone yanks the plug and the power fails. Throughout the show Banaszak keeps pulling cognitively comi-tragic stunts like this, and most of them are on the money. In an intense little room with shiny red walls "Lips and Palette at the Same Time" is, as the title asserts, a painting he used as a palette for itself. The lips stand alone, imagery-wise, opening on some pretty bad Marlboro teeth. Around them the background morass is a dusty green, erupting in lumps of squeezed-on red and yellow and white - a pox of colors. Like every canvas in the show, this one looks like it was used as a trampoline, billowing painfully on its supports and, like the rest, is discreetly littered with cat hair, dust, woodchips and the occasional gnat. You just can't fake such sincere insouciance. It works brilliantly for Banaszak, but don't try this at home, kids.

MARK KEFFER'S PAINTINGS a few blocks away at another Tremont gallery, exit {a gallery space}, aren't nearly as messy, but they share an almost desperately playful way of suspending the liveliness of paint between abstract qualities like pattern and opacity on the one hand, and an agile vocabulary of representational shapes on the other. Keffer calls his show Future of Heads, and sure enough, his acrylic-on- panel and paper works look like stills from an intergalactic version of South Park.

"AMERICAN GOTHIC" By Mark Keffer.

"American Gothic," for example, is a 4-foot-square depiction of a truly odd couple. The figural outline on the left has rabbit ears and is a cold shade of pink; its partner looks more like a skull, rendered in white with a knobby horn or part of a spinal column sticking out of its top. Neither has any features, but appears to have been carved from a stack of bricks - or maybe these are outlines only, windows opening onto masonry-like dimensional layers. Behind them a nacreous metallic blue seems to glow gently. Circles linked in various ways are visible in or under this sanded-down blue, inscribed over the fine sideways grain of Keffer's plywood surface like aerial views of crop circles, or maybe the alien blueprints for them. Seven gray and white painted circles bob over "head" across this ground, like bubbles or machines or maybe an inscription in some future alphabet of circles.

Keffer explains, "I want to construct a world comprising images and meanings culled from the fringes of consciousness, creating a kind of distant-future fantasy where animal, vegetable and mineral have merged and are fused with pure abstraction." In line with this, several works on view seem to be sprouting roots or branches, like potatoes or onions, or flowering bulbs. The smaller "Future Head" (14-by-11-inches) looks something like two spuds, one big and one small, sharing an all-over stocking cap that joins them along the bottom edge of the panel. Then again, the knitted-looking lateral stripes go straight across like TV interference and don't imply any underlying features or volume, so again the shapes are more like openings onto a flat, striped plane rather than a description of an object in real space. As elsewhere Keffer's colors are counterintuitive, stacking bands of pale lime green with synthetic Tang orange and black. The background erodes to light gray from scratchy black, spiking in at the edges. A bouquet of orange tuberous branchings spurts from the turtleneck top of the larger entity-aperture, while others gesture, arm-like, from the side.

Several works on paper are executed partly in blood. The blood is Keffer's own and yields a beautifully modulated background of red stripes, clean-edged and sculpted by the artist's ultra-meticulous taping technique. This visual subtlety in itself might be a good enough excuse for using it, but the emotional and bluntly physical resonance of blood adds all sorts of strange echoes to his hybrid figurative abstraction. Keffer prefaces the titles of this series with the words "present-day," as in "Present-day Head" and "Present-day Couple (Modern Lovers)." Five-pointed stars of various sizes rendered in a pinkish tan acrylic are sown erratically over the wall of blood in all four of these studies. Here and there the blood, so discreetly constrained to its compositional use, breaks loose, spattering and "bleeding" a little in the white margins. One begins to think about foreign wars and present-day American wounds. In "Present-day Couple" the blue-striped heads are conjoined, as if kissing, inscribed against a tight universe of careful blood and unlikely stars, as improbable as love.

Josh Banaszak: This is a Test: Through June 8 (closing reception at noon), Doubting Thomas Gallery, 856 Jefferson Ave.

Mark Keffer: The Future of Heads: Through June 21 at exit {a gallery space}, 2688 W. 14th St., 330.321.8161. (Exit {a gallery space} will close following Mark Keffer's exhibit. Gallerist Corey Baker says he may reopen at another location.)