Submitted photo Deep blacks, grays and ochre tones glow in Robert J-P. Hauck's "Icarus." The allusive title probably was added to the finished painting, with its sharp lines falling from top to bottom.

Elyse Harrison has developed a distinctive approach to fantasy, a whimsical style that involves heavily outlined and abstracted figures painted in bright flat colors. In her large public murals, the artist employs this style in a straightforward illustrative mode. In small format paintings, however, she seeks something with a little bite to it: an "Edward Gorey sort of whimsy," as she so aptly puts it. The work might indeed recall that of the famous illustrator whose cartoon drawings convey rather dark subjects. Yet, even more appropriate is a comparison to Paul Klee, both in approach to metaphorical subject as well as in inventiveness of technique. Harrison's art seems childlike, and in the sense that it emerges from a rich creative base of memories and feelings, especially those inspired by listening to music, it is much like Klee's: seemingly artless and unsophisticated even when it evinces an undeniable sophistication.

Technically, Harrison's works are more than meets the eye. All are on wooden boards primed with gel medium and painted black. Each is then raked to create a consistent texture that restores the sense of the wood beneath. Using the black textured surface as a metaphorical void, Harrison allows images, and feelings connected to them, to surface from memory, giving them form in acrylic colors. The paradoxical quality one associates with Klee -- the childlike image that manifests psychic content and balances gentle humor with pessimism -- is present in Harrison's work as well. The exhibit's title, "Dream Material" makes it clear that although she eschews violent or truly disturbing subject matter, this art is not intended to be a visual "armchair." Instead, the artist intends visual pleasure as a conduit in her search for symbolic resonance -- visual and verbal -- to give reality to the unseen experience.

The verbal dimension comes as much from her somewhat mystifying titles as from the images themselves. "A Sexual Conversation" is typical of this. Two figures, one apparently bird-like, the other perhaps an elephant, wear male and female masks and stand face to face. Of course, their true faces are hidden. Their speech is connoted by dotted lines emerging from their mouths. The lines never meet, suggesting the evasion characteristic of the sort of conversation to which the title alludes.

"Hoops Takes a Break from Working the Carrousel" has a similar effect. A stylized human figure "relaxes" from the whirlwind by turning hoops on his legs and right arm. His head is animal-like, perhaps a mask, but nevertheless sports a set of smiling teeth that add a bit of menace. In this image, Harrison's artistic process transforms a childhood memory of the carrousel operator at Glen Echo Park into a reference to the nature of our lives, with their repetitive movements and monotonous sameness. The painting brings to mind the dark humor of Charlie Chaplin in "Modern Times," continuing the motions of his factory job long after getting off the shift.

This and other small works, such as "Imaginary Danger," use animal/circus motifs as their vehicle for meaning. Two larger works, "Paper Doll Jacket and Matching Dog from the Goon Squad Collection" and "Paper Doll Party Dress from the Brand New Talk Collection" explore the absence of communication in interpersonal relations by the absence of the human figure. "What I Know," however, asserts the power of an individual affirmation against apparent meaninglessness. With its stylized human face and hands the painting visually parallels Klee's many figurative affirmations of the human spirit over the deep moral plight he found, and we might still find, in society at large.

Robert Hauck's luminous watercolors could hardly be more different. Yet for Hauck, the issue of visual pleasure as a primary and valid end to artistic experience is truly central.

"I intend for my work to remain deceptively simple," he says, "yet invite close and extended examination."

Hauck's work quite forcefully depends on visual effect and completely lacks the verbal dimension so prominent in Harrison's paintings. His "color field" paintings focus on color and line -- a beautiful, sometimes nervous, often meandering line that evokes figuration without depicting it.

Although the paintings are grouped by thematic title, they remain about abstract nuances of tone and color, resisting that conceptual crossing over into poetic metaphor. Some works, such as the two extraordinary "Chilmark" paintings, contain a horizontal organization of forms that may suggest landscape. The deep purples, hot reds and electric blues form compositions that stand on their own, but inevitably connote the American landscape that inspired them. Or, as in "Tête-à-Tête" or "Midi," apparently inspired by the south of France, hot colors in layered forms connote a dry land full of sun and warmth. Among my favorites were "Icarus," a work where the artist has used the end of the brush in wet paint as a drawing tool, and the "Embrace" series, especially "#3," a work that shows a consummate handling of grayscale tones.

Working exclusively in watercolor on heavy French paper, Hauck often uses the color directly from the tube, pushing it out with the brush to obtain a layered density that vies with gouache or other more opaque techniques. His superb handling creates an illusion of effortlessness that hides an immense skill with an unforgiving and extremely difficult medium. The density of the color, controlled and edged by Hauck's unfailing sense of composition and emotional sensibility are the keys to his art: pure visual pleasure with no excuses.

Robert Hauck's work is at Creative Partners, 4600 East-West Highway, Bethesda, 301-951-944, through Nov. 27. Elyse Harrison's "Dream Material" is at Gallery Neptune, 4808 Auburn Ave., Bethesda, 301-718-0809, through Dec. 4.