After Glow: Tom Torluemke Twisted Ambience: An Installation by Nnenna Okore Stateless: New work by Nicole Gordon Chicago Cultural Center Going through the Michigan Avenue Galleries of the Chicago Cultural Center from the southern end, the first of the three spaces is occupied by the festive and delicate paper abstractions of Tom Torluemke. Employing reflectivity, translucency, and bas-relief, Torluemke's eye-popping works feature dense pileups of flat, vivid biomorphic motifs that call to mind the understated kink in Lari Pittman's and Sue Williams' high-fructose paintings of the 1990s. The next gallery north also speaks to Chicago's taste for colorful, hard-edged pattern. Nicole Gordon's tightly-painted, baboon-festooned scenes depict lakes of lava, rude huts shaped like animal heads, and tents of richly decorated fabrics lit by single bulbs, conveying a free-association exoticism that becomes most explicit in a freestanding mixed-media totem pole in the middle of the space. The last gallery contains a grander and more intuitive approach to "the primitive." Echoing Paul Thek's mystical detritus-filled installations of the 1960s, as well as the organic monumentality of recent work by Nari Ward, the towering assemblage by Nigerian-born sculptor Nnenna Okore tangles rope, branches, and newspaper with the shadows of a darkened gallery, like a spooky homemade jungle gym. The title, "Twisted Ambience," is descriptive, though somewhat less poetic than Okone's piece deserves. While these artists are slightly more seasoned than the young Turks on display in big painting shows now at Corbett Versus Dempsey and Roots and Culture, all of this work demonstrates that visual pleasure spiced with a hint of Otherness can tantalize forbidden desires of the unconscious just as it did back at the dawn of Modernism. - Albert Stabler