DOWNTOWN

Art aficionados who’ve followed the activities of the Cirrus Gallery since its inception in the early Seventies have come to recognize a distinctive Cirrus style. It is a style with more that one facet but Gallery director Jean Milant favors subtly elegant art built around luxurious color, formal composition and vaguely metaphysical intentions. Following that blueprint, Jay McCafferty could be described as the quintessential Cirrus artist. McCafferty fashions collaged paper pieces whose lush surfaces are developed via solar burning, tearing, pasting and scribbling.

While previous work grew from Minimalist grids to lyrical, swoony romanticism, McCafferty’s latest stuff finds him moving into his Cubist period. Comprised of fragmented geometric shapes, shards of color, and networks of jagged lines, these new pictures have a terse, abrupt quality that marks a sharp shift for McCafferty. Mind you, these are still extremely classy pictures; were they not, you probably wouldn’t find them at Cirrus. (Cirrus, 542 S. Alameda St., to Nov. 29.)