ArtsCriticATL.com

When the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (ACAC) moved into its Means Street digs in 1990s, I characterized the area as the backside of Atlanta. No longer: condos, retail, coffee houses and art galleries have colonized the area, attracted to the character of the 19th-century brick warehouses that grew up alongside the railroad tracks, to the cheaper-than-Buckhead rent (at least originally) and, not least, to each other.

There were never two artists better matched than the psychedelic, suppurating, spewing, head-tripping duo of Atlanta-based Alex Kvares and Nashville-based Mark Hosford, whose work is on view at Beep Beep Gallery through May 28. The artists met in high school in Kansas — the inspiration for the show’s title, “Sasnak” — attended university together and undoubtedly will meet in that great heavy-metal parking lot in the sky.

Why is painting so pleasing when it pretends to be something it’s not? The best works in New York artist Joanne Mattera’s show “Diamond Life,” at Marcia Wood Gallery, are impostors. The artist uses the familiar material of paint and encaustic to create works on panel with the striated look and nubby texture of tweed or 1950s upholstery fabric.

“Atlanta Art Now,” planned as a biennial publication devoted to critical discussion of the city’s visual artists, has released the names of those to be featured in its inaugural volume. “NOPLACENESS” is written by a trio of Atlanta-based critics: Jerry Cullum, ArtsCriticATL’s chief art critic Catherine Fox and Cinqué Hicks. Valerie Cassel Oliver, senior curator of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, will write the book’s foreword.

The compression of space and time in the digital age and its effect on the psyche is the theme of “On the Edge of Self,” Danielle Roney’s engaging and thoughtful multimedia exhibition at Kiang Gallery through June 4.

Maurice Clifford‘s paintings are explosions of energetic forms. The works in “Beyond Words,” on view through May 25 at Tula Art Center, continue the mode he adopted as a result of a revelatory experience he had in 1970. This visionary encounter led to a style of painting that is a peeling back of reality, exposing not a hidden-behind “ultimate” truth, but only the fact that the visible, material world is not the whole of what exists right in front of our eyes: reality is only what a person chooses to see.