Deborah Zlotsky's 26 paintings at Albany Center Galleries are dark and mysterious and filled with grotesqueries and random visual scraps. The surreal people, strange creatures, fecund vegetation, ancient books are weighty with elemental themes -- birth, flesh, knowledge, desire, death, decay. What's more, throughout all the work you feel a vein of stress, of tension, a pervasive dangling uncertainty.

For all this, though, Zlotsky's art is incandescent with life. Part of the luminous seduction is the work's rich surface of glazes and varnish, which give the paintings the appearance of a dark pond skinned with ice. Their power is not by any means all surface appeal, however.

``These were important paintings for me,'' Zlotsky said last week in her studio. ``They were emotional, they were intellectual, and they were about painting. They were everything.''

It's easy to get hooked on paintings that hit all the chakras.

Zlotsky works in a smallish room in the corner of a cavernous student studio at the College of Saint Rose, where she teaches painting. Located in the Art Department building on State Street in Albany's Center Square, she has built her private studio out of room dividers arranged side by side to make walls.

Her studio table is stacked with piles of books, collections and monographs of Spanish still life, Dutch still life, American landscape, Velazquez, Georges de La Tour, Jose Ribera, Lucien Freud, the Sensation exhibit catalog, a collection of self-portraits.

``Magazines, postcards, books -- that's how I get access to great art. That's the relationship I have to the work.''

Zlotsky's imagination is pollinated by the art of the past. Most of the imagery is either lifted out of an old masterpiece, or adapted from one. What makes the paintings more than copies are the fresh contexts and recombinations the artist invents.

``I felt like I was constantly taking a risk with this work,'' Zlotsky confided. She worked intuitively -- no plan or preconceived image. No preliminary sketches? No sketchbooks? ``I have little slips of paper,'' she said, showing me the b ack of a bill scribbled with a visual notation.

Intuition, like dream, can be richly allusive, but also intellectually elusive. Zlotsky's paintings are like certain lyric poems you understand only when you don't dissect them.

``People want to know, does this mean this?,'' said the artist. ``There is no one-line explanation.''

The paintings' vagueness point to their spiritual nature. Her work is contemplative precisely because you don't ``get'' it in a quick look. The paintings of old, crammed with subject-matter and placed where they could be stared at, were objects meant to be contemplated. ``That's what I want to do with my paintings,'' Zlotsky says.

As with certain kinds of prayer, however, the meditations are not all-together soothing.

There is a profound tension in Zlotsky's work, of people, things and states of being arrested in mid-motion. The artist takes what she can gather from coincidence, simultaneity and synchronicity.

``That's what life is, it's all about this tense balance,'' she explained. ``There's always this pressure, combined with vulnerability.''