The dandy has long been an archetypal figure promenading through culture. Charles Baudelaire described him in “The Painter of Modern Life” as a character “outside the law,” but living by another set of strict moral codes and social meters. Baudelaire goes on to assert that dandies are men of passion, but without concern, free from strife and open to love and pleasure. Gérard de Nerval and Oscar Wilde were both famous for their dandyism and were each said to walk pet lobsters through the street. In several of his books, William Burroughs (who admired Baudelaire and Wilde), describes dandies and hip priests of culture in suits with lobster claws and reversible linings, walking through esplanades and enacting rites of leisure.

At his recently closed first solo exhibition at Kansas Gallery, “Thirteen,” Tomer Aluf presented sardonic oil paintings, rich with eroticism and wit. The thirteen untitled works employ repeated motives: fancy shoes with their toes pointing upwards, lobster claws, “Oi!!” written in large block letters, harlequins, wine glasses, limbs. Aluf, born in Tel Aviv and now working in Brooklyn, has some of the characteristics of a dandy himself. He wears beautiful shoes, long scarves, and sharp overcoats. But he’s not above dirtying his hands with paint in the studio, and obviously derives a lot of sensual pleasure from the labor. The paint is applied in thick daubs and brushy, gestural miasmas, though blank expanses of gessoed canvas remain in many works and earlier images are often partially erased or obscured by later layers. Figurative elements, such as hands or the lower half of a comici dell’arte, are sketched in loose, quick caricatures.

Among his other allusions to the sensual, in one large painting (60 by 54 inches), Aluf has attached whole almonds, a gambit he’s used in previous pictures, such as one displayed at Bodega Gallery’s New York location this past spring. Although they don’t carry the same connotations of luxury, the nuts do share in a kind of bohemian lexicon. Their shape can be read as heads and breasts and testicles. And their culinary flexibility ranges from 99¢ Blue Diamond-brand single-serving packages of almonds found in local delis to chic and conscientious gluten-free torts and milk substitutes, to Spanish gastronomical imports.

The reiterated “Oi!!” that appears on several of the canvases is a punk salutation or exclamation sometimes (or perhaps formerly) found among working class urban youth in the UK and the northeast US. It amounts to something like “hey you!” and calls out to the viewer as a passerby on the street. Galleries and museums can often be frustratingly similar to boulevards and bazaars, but here the stroll feels more like the kind of Baudelairian experience of the sidewalk that have amazed urbanites since the dawn of the industrial era. Images, people, and fashions move through the crowd (which was thick at the exhibition’s opening in early September), and the cry can carry both tinges of exuberance and a bit of danger.

In another large painting, images couple with one another, as Aluf has pasted an unstretched “Oi!!” canvas onto a larger picture. A hand extends from its corporeal spray of orange, reaching around, down, to pinch or clutch something like a green thigh. A lobster claw mirrors the action, curling around the arm in the opposite direction. Marching loafers, each with a prominent heel, rings the whole composition.

These works, far sparer than those he has previously exhibited, can be a little taunting. They often deny easy finishes or the appearance of completion. Aluf has, here, seized on moments to explore — as in the end of a sumptuous dinner with an attractive guest, at a now thoroughly cluttered table, the bohemian spendthrift covers the check at the sidewalk café with a recent windfall, while pedestrians pass. Maybe that kind of narrative extrapolation is a little much, but in like way his skeins of dry-brushed paint, running over muddy passages and text, focus on the narrative interaction with the viewer along her path and the painter along the picture plane, without regard to expected trajectories. Neither party is clear on where the situation is headed, but he has left open other possibilities in the paintings’ unfinished-looking states. Fresh food, rich paint, good clothes, a stroll, beautiful bodies in a crowd: these are simple pleasures.

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A cursory glance at Michael Berryhill’s paintings could lead to a mistake on the order of confusing fiberglass insulation with cotton candy. So beware of complacency induced by pastel colors, sensuous surfaces and snarky titles. Something disturbing may be lurking behind the cheerful ambiguities in the nine new paintings and vitrine of drawings in his new show at Kansas Gallery.

Saturn n Son (all 2014), a play on words of the ‘70s sitcom Sanford and Son, is the title of two initially puzzling paintings in Kansas’s rear room. Layered in mostly blues and rusty browns, they seem to represent an indistinct, non-descript figure, which could be a piece of disintegrated statuary, bent over in some kind of activity. Without knowing the title, the activity could range from manual labor to microscopic examination.

However anyone who has a passing acquaintance with art history will immediately recognize the Saturn in the title as the one Goya depicts devouring his son. Which of course makes the figure in Berryhill’s painting discernable as Goya’s wild-eyed, child-eating demon, and Berryhill’s resonances with Goya more obvious. The TV show reference emphasizes a bit of campy goofiness in the Goya seen from the present, despite the horrific subject matter, and conveys a spirit of ambivalence that permeates this work.

Berryhill is not ambivalent about his ambition however. Though modest in scale, the paintings use expensive, thick-weave linen, a high culture archival maneuver that serves to offset some of the low culture references, and telegraphs his seriousness. Berryhill nods to not only Goya, but Picasso, Matisse and Bonnard, as well as his contemporaries, such as Dana Schutz. He places himself in an early modernist painting tradition that, despite an apparently abstract affect, is always representational in its ultimate methods.

The major ambivalences in this show concern the perception of the imagery and how important it is to decipher it. Berryhill presents his subjects theatrically with proscenium-like verticals as quotation marks and a shallow horizontal strip at the bottom that stages each event. The grain of the linen, and small, dry brushstrokes allow Berryhill to use a halftone-like layering process, producing a surface of fuzzy colors and figure-ground inversions. The results are images seeming indefinite, corroded, or out of focus.

Like the wordplay of his titles, each of Berryhill’s paintings involves some kind of visual misreading or multiplicity of meaning. Indeed the very title of the exhibition, Beggars Blanket, is an obvious reference to the 1968 Rolling Stones album, Beggar’s Banquet, replacing a humble repast with an inadequate fuzzy fabric (the canvases themselves?).

How we respond then is always dependent on how easily one psychologically negotiates the frustration of not being able to resolve the paintings into coherent images.

Some viewers will simply accept the work as abstract and just appreciate the sensuous, warm and fuzzy mood it projects, which can lead to overlooking a reference to parental cannibalism. But the sustained attention required of viewers to parse partial bits of imagery in hopes of a deeper comprehension carries a risk for the artist. Too much unresolved ambiguity, coupled with a flippant title, like Axis of Easel, might interfere with the painting attaining memorability, and the futility of finding resolution could overwhelm the artist-viewer bond.

Long Long, Gone Gone, a painting with fairly straightforward imagery, is a great ploy to engage one in the work’s hermeneutics as well as a direct statement of Berryhill’s themes. This painting depicts the back of a longhaired person, left hand to brow in a peering-off-into-the-distance gesture, and with a parrot on the right shoulder.

The formal ambiguities are easy to parse, but their metaphorical implications give the painting gravitas. The airy blue background, grading from ultramarine to cerulean, can be either sky or sea, or both, and the blue reappears at the bottom to frame the bust of a figure, who, given the layered hairdo and delicate wrist is probably meant to be seen as female. Or the bottom strip might indicate that the figure is submerged to her chest in water. To her chest that is, if the patterned rectangular shape spanning the canvas is her back, and not in fact the back of a couch. The parrot, as signifier of both imitation and piracy, is depicted as a degraded representation. The searching gesture, which echoes our own concentration of looking, seems futile because nothing can be deciphered from the scumbled brushstrokes that represent the distance.

The title, Long Long, Gone Gone, can represent not only our own fruitless attempts to find meaning in Berryhill’s paintings, but perhaps an elegy for the past itself — a recognition that painting has departed as the major vehicle for conveying cultural meaning. Despite the rigor and purpose that Berryhill brings to his paintings, there is also a sophisticated understanding of that ship having already sailed, and we peer desperately at its surface, trying to understand why it exists, trusting only our own perceptions, Flaubert’s stuffed parrot squawking useless artspeak at our shoulder.

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