Much more mysterious than McCafferty’s solar-burn collages are Daniel Douke’s trompe l’oeil paintings of cardboard boxes. Only a telltale seam here, a suspiciously reflective patch there, ultimately reveal that the cardboard boxes protruding from the wall are in fact three-dimensional paintings. That revelation is slow in coming, however, so beautifully rendered is the deceit.

In his fusion of painting, sculpture and photography, Douke is engaged in pursuits shared by a number of artists working today: Sylvia Mangold’s masking-tape paintings, Jud Nelson’s marble “Wonder Bread” sculptures, Michael

It is difficult to look at Jay McCafferty’s solar burn collages without conjuring up metaphors of the artist as Promethean figure. With a magnifying lens as net, McCafferty captures the sun’s rays and focuses them onto grid points on the ink-washed surfaces of layered vellum paper. The paper burns, creating erratic shapes which ultimately penetrate and expose other layers. In many of the works, charred bits of painted paper have been collaged to the top layer, yielding incredibly fragile, visually seductive surfaces. The natural “destruction” of the burned paper is pulled together by the applied