Scratching the surface Squeak Carnwath's diaristic paintings at Nielsen Gallery plumb the artist's psyche using paint and language. They recall Jean Michel Basquiat's amalgams of graffiti-style hieroglyphs and scrawled text. Carnwath's musings ponder the nature of perception and reality and view painting as a metaphor for life.

The text, which she often offers on lined paper affixed to the canvas, can be charming but also aphoristic and psychoanalytically glib. "Freud sez: 'When you think of me, think of Rembrandt. A little light & a lot of darkness.' " Her humor is too sweet; she explains away rawness , rather than letting it speak its truth.

Carnwath's painting, on the other hand, is engrossing. She covers her panels in layers of oil and alkyd , building up a scuffed but often luminous surface. She scratches and digs into it, smudges it up, draws over it, and more.

"The Whole World" features a multicolored brick-wall grid at the top and a looser, larger patchwork of blocks at the bottom. Erasures, scribbles, and drips play along with images: the black disks of LPs, a palm print, Wedgewood vases, and several pictures of a scruffy-looking man wearing a laurel wreath. A tree stump drawn in spare green right in the center looks ghostly, yet anchors everything else. Ultimately, the paintings add up to more than a woman working the kinks out of her ordinarily troubled soul. The text is merely a note in a bottle floating over the paintings' grittier and more mysterious depths.

In the abstract Rebecca Morris is a disciple of abstraction, quoting and twitting her forebears, sometimes to great effect in her show at Samson Projects. One untitled work -- a small triangular canvas -- recalls Frank Stella 's black paintings. This one's a cloud of choking coal gray. Stella's works were monumental; Morris's probably stands 18 inches tall, and it's defiantly rimmed with juicy tones -- turquoise, yellow, lavender -- that drip down the edges. No monument, and it's pretty, to boot. An untitled collage sports shards of cardboard, each speckled-over like a Pollock painting -- only the collage is tiny and broken up, and its colors are girlie pinks and purples. They float over a watercolor wash of glowing peach.

Not all of this artist's works are jewel-like or subversively pretty. Morris's strength is in the way she shuffles textures. Two untitled canvases feature jagged networks of intersecting lines, some applied with hazy spray paint, others in glossy, caked streaks of oil paint. One of these is almost all in shades of brown, save for a single thread of neon orange zapping through all the painterly bravado like a lightning bolt. In the other, silvery passages of paint partially fill in spaces between the lines, making a steely counterpoint to the soaking, blurred quality of the network.

There's a sense, in works like the last, that Morris has a lexicon of images, textures, and references that she hasn't quite integrated. The tensions are intriguing, but it's not enough to simply create contrasts. Look at a small, circular work in which moody splatter painting is interrupted by a bold zigzag of thick gold paint. It's just the beginning of a story: Opposites meet. What happens next?

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