Simply put, the tiny paintings that Chimes organizes into grids of 25 paintings (each multi-panel grid constitutes one work) are a kind of visual poetry, meant to be "read" like iambic pentameter, line by line. The raised images that inhabit each painting are Chimes' personal vocabulary of characters largely plumbed from Alfred Jarry's novel, Gestes et opinions du Docteur Faustroll, Pataphysician, and his Ubu plays, as well as Jarry's real-life friend, the Symbolist writer Jean Moréas, all reduced to caricatures of themselves.

Even if you have a working knowledge of pataphysics and Chimes' long preoccupation with it - as anyone who visited Chimes' retrospective might - these new paintings are as enigmatic as any of his previous works, if not more so. His caricatures are looking increasingly faint and worn, as though they've become the essence of themselves. Some of the raised gold circles around the images in the paintings have been sanded down in places, too, giving them the appearance of antique plates, medallions, or even orbs.

Whatever mystery the Iambic Paintings hold at their core, the code can only be broken by Chimes. That metaphysical certainty, coupled with the measured, steady rhythm of these works, makes them the most majestic paintings of his career so far.

At the Painted Bride

First, watch Wendy L. Weinberg's video, "Am the Rhythm," to get a proper introduction (being counterintuitively played at the back of the second-floor space). This lively film has a syncopated beat of its own as it shows Spector on studio visits with her artists and parts of the show's installation, including work being painted and constructed on-site.

Isaac Tin Wei Lin's two architectonic sculptures composed of painted cardboard boxes - one a tower that reaches almost to the ceiling and confronts you as soon as you enter the ground-floor space, and the other the box equivalent of a stone wall on the second floor - set the structure of the exhibition.

The geometric linear paintings of Laura Watt across from the fluid fantasies of painter Jackie Tileston create a triangle with Jeanne Jaffe's bulbous resin sculptures. These three artists' works are so full and intense, you can practically see the sparks flying between them (come to think of it, Tileston's paintings suggest abstracted electrical storms and some of Jaffe's sculptures are connected by rubber cords).

By contrast, Andrew Jeffrey Wright's pattern paintings (imagine your grandmother's needlepoint Bargello-pattern cushions in early '70s album-cover colors) and an infinite-loop DVD have a contemplative place to themselves upstairs, separated from Weinberg's video "room" by Lin's all-black wall. A very smart move.

At the Free Library

That was the main thought that occurred to me as I walked through the Free Library's "When Printmaking and Photography Collide," although I admired the technical audacity, humor and sheer beauty of Virgil Marti's "Memorial Garden," a photoshopped collage of digital snapshots printed as a repeating pattern on a large-format ink-jet printer.

Marti aside, though, the most intriguing works in this exhibition, organized by Karen Lightner and Patricia M. Smith, are the images born of casein, dirt, and scrubbing on archival rag paper by Donald Camp; Scott McMahon's fictional narratives starring himself, as Van Dyke brown and gum bichromate prints, and Paul Cava's eerie portraits and collages, most of which are unique and some of which are Van Dyke brown prints.

The books in this show, by Lois Johnson, Teresa Jaynes, Elena Bouvier, and others, are amazingly inventive, but they're books, prints, and photographs all in one. They could have made up an entire exhibition.

Although the show consists largely of the efforts of 19 local photographers, printmakers and book artists, it's also an opportunity to see prints from the library's own holdings, among them a Warhol, a Rosenquist, and a Dine.