Beauty, adrift in metaphors

His works at AIB’s Main Gallery include several titled by the Argentinean poet Graciela de Oliveira. Many of these have no people in them at all; furniture stands in for the absent body, mysteriously crossing boundaries. In “Su Mano Vacila y me Roza (His Hand Vacillates and Touches Me),’’ the outer edges of two straight-backed chairs twine together, as if arm in arm, in an empty wood-paneled room. This series is all on gold leaf over red paper, tones that recall altarpieces and imbue the works with the suggestion of the sacred. Empty of people, they are haunting.

When people show up, though, González Palma forces his metaphors: In the diptych “Las Sombras de su Niñez (The Shadows of His Youth)’’ a young man sits across a scuffed table from a skull in a party hat. The man looks away, but of course, death is undeniable.

The “Jerarquías de Intimidad la Anunciación’’ series takes off from the Annunciation, the angel Gabriel’s revelation to the Virgin Mary that she would give birth to the Son of God. In many of these color digital prints, hands appear out of nowhere, touching people and gesturing. “Variación #6’’ has a cupped hand beneath the chin of a man in a red shirt and black jacket; his eyes are closed, his face turned up and bathed in light.

Unlike during the Renaissance, when religious imagery was one of art’s great currencies, it’s difficult today to portray religious experience in a manner that doesn’t seem trite or hokey. All the hands floating around these works don’t evoke a comforting presence so much as a prop from a low-grade horror movie.