Piece together the clues

Most of the works in Romanian artist Victor Man's haunting U.S. debut are small, dark and virtually illegible from any significant distance -- they require an intimate degree of engagement. Moving through the show is a little like stepping up to an assortment of keyholes and peering into dark rooms where something sordid may or may not have occurred. It's not always clear what you're looking at, what it means or whether it's something you really want to be seeing, but each glimpse is engrossing.

The show's spare and somewhat delicate installation involves paintings, wall drawings, photographs (most printed on clear acetate and pinned directly to the wall), a large sheet of painted black glass and a handful of sculptural elements -- everything cast in tones of black, white, gray or silver. The imagery, drawn from a variety of unnamed sources, is obscure but suggestive, often ominous: the silhouette of a woman in historical dress, holding what looks like a rat in a cage (this is one of the wall drawings); a pair of women's legs; smoke curling from the end of a cigarette.

Individual images acquire a narrative, almost cinematic connotation from their proximity to one another, like pieces of evidence gathered in the investigation of a crime. One grouping, for instance, combines a fashion shot of a mostly nude Jessica Alba; a photograph of three jocular young men lounging on a pile of logs; another of three shadows falling across a grave; a painting of something white -- perhaps a garment -- that looks to have been lost or abandoned; and a commercially manufactured black flag emblazoned with a skull and crossbones.

The relationship between these disparate objects is loose and impressionistic -- suggesting less a particular story than a set of narrative tendencies revolving around themes of the body, sexuality, violence, fear and desire.

Animals figure in several works, emphasizing the primal nature of these themes. The second of the two wall drawings, for instance, depicts a tangled mound of limbs and fur: wolves, it turns out, devouring the body of a creature who is half-woman, half-horse. The image is fierce and intensely erotic but rendered in very faint charcoal outlines, so that it seems to hover on the wall like an apparition, nearly invisible from across the room.