Hollywood

Lisa Ferrante, who lives in Taos, N.M., works in a high-keyed Southwestern religious idiom that works best when she surrenders completely to its fierce side. Most remarkable are the skeleton woodcuts--not prints on paper but finely cut blocks of wood framed in painted boxes edged with delicate hammered tin.

In “Job,” the beleaguered figure, his gaunt black-speckled body delineated in the fine horizontal “ribbing” of the gouged-out wood, lives under a flaming peaked roof barely keeping lightning and a tornado at bay. Woodcut crucifixion images have a similar naive-but-knowing power. The linear black moire effect of sky, water and land in “El Calvario” adds a harshly romantic global vision to the ultimate scene of suffering.

Lacking such a personal and exotic style, Ferrante’s paintings tend to look more generic, sometimes even downright kitschy. “La Curandera,” the faith healer, is a black boulder of a woman with clenched hands sitting in a bare space with a pair of long-burning candles. In “Naked Crucifixion,” the silhouetted view against an evening sky seems awfully hackneyed, even with the mysterious presence of four moons.

But a fine otherworldly delicacy surfaces in “La Bruja.” A nude, antlered sorceress seen in the gray light of a clearing, she holds blood-spurting crosses in each hand for an audience of black cats. (Newspace Gallery, 5241 Melrose Ave., to July 30.)