The first sign Deborah Zlotsky has hooked you with her recent paintings is that you don't know where to begin. The more you look, the more you have to look.

Every attempt to grasp quickly what is going on -- the symbols in the form of bodies or objects, the deceptively simple use of an implied proscenium to stage the interactions between the things, the finely honed classical realism beneath layers of messy varnish and corrosion -- only leaves you lost in purposeful ambiguity.

The exhibition at RC The Arts Center is called ``Past Present'' not only because the iconography borrows fluidly from contemporary and art-historic sources, but because the psychological implications suggest a misalignment of distant memory and immediate experience. Objects, references and moods are choreographed together in a kind of freeze-frame from some murky, surreal theater.

The symbolism is itself concrete, if obscure, and often suggests a sense of inexplicable action and reaction between the components of any single painting. In one, a pile of books has an eye screw buried into the top volume; in another, a serpentine tube protrudes from the bulbous side of a glass flask. Wires are often seen suspending some object, familiar or strange, underscoring their enactments as props in an artist's still life.

All of Zlotsky's works, even the few involving human figures, are still lifes, and the careful placement of objects against dark, often depthless backgrounds recalls the whole history of that form. Whether 17th-century depictions of vegetables and game or 20th-century arrangements of machine parts, a still life is typically appreciated for its formal, technical strengths and for what its contents signify. So it is with Zlotsky's work.

A small 1997 painting, ``Sweet Natured,'' is relatively simple. A bowl of peaches or apples dominates the lower half, and above floats a grayish, brain-like shape. In the center, tiny and almost not registering at first glance, a single gray medicinal capsule is suspended, perhaps a Prozac-like suggestion of a contrived happiness relating to the title. The fruit, painted with a hard naturalism borrowed from an earlier century, is almost too innocently idyllic against the dark and endless space behind it.

The surreal, in art as well as literature, always depends on what is very familiar and real to succeed. Our reactions depend on the full weight of that grounding in the normal world, so being lurched into a disturbing and implausible fantasy is not just an external curiosity but something pertaining very much to ourselves, our own interior mental troubles.

Or horrors. In a large, untitled 1999 work, we sink into dark pools of bloody burgundy. On the left, several ears float up from a deep, glossy cloud, formless and foreboding, creating a strange oval. To the right, next to the cloud, a flask or vase with a slit in the side is quickly being covered by a greenish-white substance, a powdery fluid that gushes from an unseen source far above.

This is curious enough to look at just in terms of color, layer and strangely modulated tonal recesses. But the events also demand some kind of accounting. Yet, as if interpreting our own dreams, we are wakeful in front of the painting with an undefined queasiness that does not wane with analysis. It is the broader sensation that seems to be the object.

This is true throughout. If Zlotsky's approach seems to fall into a restricted pattern -- ubiquitous dark background, similar peculiar objects in juxtaposition and consistent luminous colors under a skin of irregular, glossy varnish -- it somehow never becomes redundant. There are bones, hooks, strings, hands, fish and human bodies, adult and infant. There is dementia, curiosity, humor (a little) and childlike wonder. And there is the artist's technique, which becomes an essential contributor of its own.

In fact, it is the very careful, very expert painting itself that lends the works credence. Nothing is painted quickly, so certain objects -- a little spring toy or the mouth of a young man -- appear with such breathtaking likeness and beauty that they are persuasive in themselves. And the layers of overvarnish, which at times degrade the clarity of the painting behind, give the surfaces a rich, tactile complexity.

One of the most emblematic works is the large ``Nature Morte,'' in which a monstrous, misshapen animal head points its dissimilar eyes at us as if imploring or demanding. Around it is the usual Zlotsky murk. At the bottom, a long, horizontal blackboard is painted brightly, with clarity, and it is blank. In one corner, a red thumbtack is pressed, somehow, into the slate, holding a tiny square of white paper.

It, too, is utterly, suggestively void.