A move into white for Thomas Chimes and vibrant work from Stuart Netsky light up Locks Gallery.

Stuart Netsky and Thomas Chimes certainly belong on any short list of most-appreciated or most-respected Philadelphia artists. Both are admired by their peers and both currently have shows at Locks Gallery -- shows that should be seen.

In spite of his erudition and iconic status as the local guardian of the Modernist avant-garde flame, painter Tom Chimes is down to earth and affable in person and infectiously enthusiastic about his personal pantheon. It is distinctively European, including the French writer Alfred Jarry and composer Erik Satie as well as American Edgar Allan Poe.

From his current exhibition at Locks, I am setting aside numerous beautifully realized portraits of Chimes' heroes in order to comment on two specific subjects. The first is Waterfall (1980), the largest painting in the room and, within the radiant white context of the other works, the most colorful. The falls, Niagara viewed from a position similar to the famous Frederick Church representation, are veiled in luminous vapor.

Chimes explains that this painting, which "represents the most abrupt transition between any two phases in my work at any time in the past," was the first he executed in his current studio, formerly occupied by Tom Palmore. Chimes required a new studio as a consequence of divorce following 39 years of marriage. Palmore had left behind a large canvas beautifully primed, promising to send for it in the future. But before that could happen, Chimes appropriated the canvas. (He later paid for it.)

It was an epiphany, abandoning his dark brownish portraits of the 1970s and taking up large, soft pastry brushes. "Boom!" he exclaims, "Dark into light." Beginning with the horizon, a muted blue violet band in the distance, a waterfall scene from a postcard came into his mind. Its rainbow fragment dominating the lower portion resonated with familiar literary images and with Duchamp's deeply symbolic waterfall. Chimes decided to make the entire painting from the colors of the rainbow: primaries red, yellow and blue and secondaries green, orange and violet. But he allowed them to be suffused in light, as colored lights refracted through a prism emerge as white. This color-saturated white increasingly dominated subsequent paintings, obscuring images of encrypted detail and almost hallucinatory embedded color.

An often revisited landscape subject is Memorial Hall as Chimes recalls it from childhood, seen in a certain light at a particular season of the year. Sometimes depicted framed between two Civil War monuments, the domed building becomes the eminence in the distance -- a thing, perhaps constructed but equally perhaps natural, that breaks the horizon. It is a singularity against a field, a mystery to be contemplated, perhaps explored or simply acknowledged. We recognize ourselves in it, a cycle of knowledge that flows back from the object to our understanding. On one hand, it is negligible, a nothing; and yet, it is everything. Chimes reminds us that all we can achieve in life is to rise above the horizon in the infinite, ineffable field of light and color.

Occupying the ground floor at Locks, Stuart Netsky is widely recognized for his adventurous three-dimensional work, including installations. An early favorite was a series of casts taken from classical sculpture fragments and made of edible and medicinal materials. His 1994 show at the Institute of Contemporary Art was composed largely of clothing and furniture; however, Netsky has made many painting-linked works, from "flicker" paintings constructed of sequin-like disks, to works incorporating makeup and nail polish. Now he paints in a relatively traditional format.

The paintings are, as Netsky intended, beautiful and seductive, a reflection of his extraordinary sensitivity to materials. As we observed in the cosmetic paintings, these pieces suggest a performative narrative in which the paint appears to be still molten and alive.

The colors throughout are bold, although Netsky is colorblind and perceives more subtleties of value and texture than hue. Pours of enamel sign paint on Plexiglas may remind viewers of the techniques of Morris Lewis, but this paint remains discrete upon an obdurate surface, co-mingling with its kind, bonded but never fused. The Plexi panel remains object-like even as the treatment becomes painterly, contrasting matte and glossy textures, crazing, as ceramists say, or separating into alligator textures. In addition to pouring, Netsky has manipulated the paint in many cases, almost combed like a Venetian feather-printed paper, in Blue Foulard, but retaining a raw immediacy.

Now, Voyager, the exhibition title, and Jezebel were both vehicles for Bette Davis. Her character's red dress in Jezebel is perhaps related to the horizontal-stroked red and blue stripes in Netsky's painting of the same name. The Kindness of Strangers and Suddenly, Last Summer again remind us of representations of elegant but beleaguered 20th-century women. All these fictional femmes were created at about the same time abstract painters challenged American complacency in very different ways. Part of the dramatic subtext in these paintings may be a transcendent collision of style and substance, an acceptance of things that, like the pigments Netsky pours, do not blend but most certainly co-exist.