A group exhibit at Maryland Art Place, "Hidden Revealed," presents mostly figurative imagery and even several language-based works, but the art deliberately refuses to be reduced to a single or simple reading.

That's because these artists tend to make paintings, drawings, prints, photographs and mixed-media works that literally rely on layered imagery. Figure is drawn on top of figure or paint layer goes on top of paint layer. All this layering gives you a lot of visual information, but there's so much of it that even the representational work verges on abstraction.

By way of representational excess, a good place to start are the pencil drawings of Michael Iampieri such as "Everybody in TIME," "Everybody in "THE NATIONAL ENQUIRER" and "All the Food in COOKING LIGHT." There are so many sketchy, magazine-inspired portraits crowding against each other that some figurative details are easy to see and others are lost in a dense tangle of pencil lines.

These drawings evoke the sensory overload of modern media culture, in which an abundance of visual information ironically leads to less understanding.

For an example of a painter who really piles on the imagery, look at a series of mixed-medium paintings by Randi Reiss-McCormack titled "Pirouette." These circular paintings contain nursery rhyme-derived figurative fragments and decorative patterns so densely packed together that your eyes will dance around taking them all in. The frames are just as busy, because they're made of patterned, upholstery-type material.

By way of language-based art, Hadieh Shafie uses ink and acrylic paint to write out words in Farsi. The calligraphic script already has a beautifully flowing quality, but by placing these horizontal lines of text in such close proximity in "205812" the artist makes what amounts to an abstract painting.

Already working entirely in an abstract method is Kevin Kepple, whose paintings are comprised of densely layered glue medium, ink and varnish on flat pieces of birch. From a distance, "Bloodless" seems to be no more than a sequence of three glossy, all-white paintings. Pull closer, however, and the monochromatic surface is seen to be anything but smooth. There are bumps, patterns and ripples everywhere.

In Kepple's "Furnace II," the one color you will not see is white. This painting has so many glowing and tightly packed rust- and yellow-hued blobs of color that it really does have a molten appearance. The layers of paint enhance the sense of a furnace fire so hot that it might as well be termed volcanic.

Also showing in this exhibit curated by Peter Dubeau are Dean Kessmann, with 10 photographs of the spaces normally hidden behind walls, and Michelle La Perriere, with 15 monoprints in which songbirds and other natural images melt into abstracted passages.

"Hidden Revealed" runs through Sept. 6 at Maryland Art Place, at 8 Market Place at Baltimore's Inner Harbor. Call 410-962-8565 or go to www.mdartplace.org.

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