Mimi Czajka Graminski's sculptural hangings are deceptively simple, and Robert Longley's wax and oil paintings are deceptively complicated.

Their unexpected interaction, as installed in the persuasive self-titled two-person show at the Albany Center Galleries, is very satisfying. And it is temporary, since the two won't likely be shown together this way again. Both Graminski and Longley find something aesthetically basic and palpably resonant using different yet complementary strategies.

The layered and repetitive figures or dress-shapes of cloth and plastic of Graminski owe something to feminist art history, exploring territory that seems defined by her being a woman. Yet there is no political cast to the constructions, their formal qualities overwhelming intrinsic meaning.

By repeating archetypal shapes -- basic stick figures, silhouetted outlines and a range of dresses and skirts of all sizes -- a distinct visual effect gels. Often, the rhythmic pace of many similar, familiar, repeating shapes makes it pleasant. This is more like a clothing store display, a superficial effect, with a little bit of humor and precious little conceptual intent.

In some cases, especially when the artist has used translucent fabrics or screen materials, a layering of textures occurs. Sometimes this even activates the viewer's peripheral vision on circling the gallery.

Beyond all these formal games, which are fun but a little limiting, there are at least whiffs of heavier meaning for the speculative. Graminski's dresses are empty, her figures have no faces, and an ongoing sameness and generic characterization leads to an anonymity and blankness of spirit.

As one example, the 27 paper cutouts draped in three rows over horizontal copper pipes might just suggest exhaustion. But it might easily recall a girl's introduction to the ballet barre, and her becoming one of a line of similar, interchangeable, look-alike girls. This is a gently arctic view of life, suggesting without explicitly saying that we are all numbers and cogs. Or that we are all, in this case, just fodder for well-made, oddly resolved design experiments.

As I was about to turn away, a little boy came in with his mother (tugging on one of the hanging figures when she wasn't looking) and said ``People made this stuff.''

The mother replied, ``Yes, they did.''

A pause, then, ``Mom, these are amazing!''

Longley received no such innocent praise. But I think this is partly because paintings are harder to understand than objects. And the textual/pictorial mixture so carefully achieved, again and again, is difficult to penetrate.

But for older people, that's a good thing. In rough, brushy strokes, typically monochromatic, he creates large ``blurry'' images of roads, highway underpasses or sometimes a pair of indistinct figures. These are solidly conceived but deliberately unreadable, as if looking through a fogged glass, clarifying only from the long distances allowed in this sprawling gallery.

Obscuring the image even further are two layers of handwritten text. Many lines of small words cover the whole surface, with what seems to be first-person accounts only partially legible. Much larger, and even harder to read, are a few words blurring through the rest.

Whether or not you might pick out a short phrase, about some past experience or current feeling, you mainly know these are inner thoughts. They mix and confuse not only with each other, but with the scene, the image, which may or may not be an immediate present. Layers of temporal, narrative content get incorporated abstractly, rather than as a specific (descriptive) confluence. The paintings represent a psychological condition.

This final effect is quite appealing, both visually and as an idea in itself. The utter sameness of the method (the range of color, the size and amount of text, the clarity and scale of the image, the subjects, and so on) cries out for change and invention. Or it demands an expressive patina that goes beyond the considerable intellectual formula so well exploited so far.

Upstairs, the remarkable one-person exhibition of Deborah Zlotsky's paintings updates the 1999 showing she had at the old RCCA in Troy. Many of the pieces are the same, and the new ones continue her use of gloomy, disturbed scenes. Grotesque and disfigured bodies, bizarre, nearly alien creatures that are but half human, tidbits of still-life cliches torn out of context are again called onto the proscenium of a medieval drama.

Zlotsky is one of the area's most significant painters, and a second view of her work is a lucky break. The iconography is certainly disturbing. But it raises questions that are not academic. It shocks without glee. The hard detail, the murky depths of shadow, the peculiar organic events, the old masters' yellowing colors and the surfaces themselves, which are globbed with thick, even wrinkled layers of varnish, all show a command of both technique and purpose.

The corporeal disgust is offset by a bizarre playfulness -- in one case a two-headed toy is held by strings over an open blank book. Primordial fluids and theatrical, almost virtuosic surrealism (combining shades of Dali, Bosch and maybe Joel-Peter Witkin) sometimes seems to border on the glib, or at least indulgent.

But none of this appears facile. These are depths we secretly want to encounter.