John O'Reilly at Howard Yezerski

For "Contradictions: To Rimbaud-Verlaine," John O'Reilly chose 20 of his Polaroid montages from the past dozen years to explore the dualities exemplified by the 19th-century poets and lovers Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine. O'Reilly's quiet composite images--always modestly sized, black and white, precisely hand-cut and seamlessly assembled--might be seen as unlikely reflections of a legendarily volatile couple. Working with vintage found and copied images as well as his own self-portrait photographs, O'Reilly assembles vast fantasy worlds.

As Verlaine and Rimbaud (1994) consists of two images paired in a vintage double frame (about 7 by 10 inches overall). The head of each poet is joined to an unclothed torso (O'Reilly's own, according to gallery information), and each figure is layered upon a shadowy interior with curtained windows and antique wallpaper. O'Reilly installed this piece in the middle of the gallery's longest wall to act as a dividing point between the directly Rimbaud-influenced works on the right and the Verlaine-shadowed works on the left.

A Somerville Youth (2005, about 7 by 22 inches), on the Verlaine side, is architectural rather than figurative. A small panoramalike montage of stacked toy blocks, planes and angles, it conjures deep, complex spaces--a metaphor, perhaps, for the twists and turns of the mind. On the Rimbaud side is a work called Two Artists (1996, roughly 9 by 6 inches). The vertical composition consists of borrowed images from Velazquez and Eakins, the former's painting of Queen Mariana combined with the latter's pastoral photo of two male nudes. The photo is placed upon the lower half of the queen's skirt so that her elaborate panniers merge into Eakins's gladelike setting. In a Rimbaudesque hallucinatory moment, one sees the slender nude men as her exposed legs.

O'Reilly's photomontages cut across time. Elegantly composed and precisely crafted, they are immediate and erotic; they also exude a Victorian sense of mystery and sentimentality. Looking at them, one feels the pull of a dusky attic full of somehow crucial secrets and memories.

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