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OBSESSIONS. DECORATION. SALIENT FACTS. A t Foto Relevance, lush scenes of Florentine gardens and streetscapes — including the symbol of this Renaissance city, Florence Cathedral's Il Duomo — are among inverted images superimposed onto book-lined rooms filled with centuries-old antiques and art. No, these expansive photographs are not a trick of the latest Photoshop technology; they're created by a technique widely known in the Renaissance, thanks to the writings of Leonardo da Vinci: camera obscura, in which light passing through a pinhole device transposes the projected images upside down. (It's conjectured that Vermeer employed this method in his paintings depicting 17th-century Dutch bourgeoise interiors.) The artist of these contemporary camera obscura photographs is Abelardo Morell, no stranger to photography insiders. The Boston-based veteran of many FotoFest Biennials is widely exhibited internationally and collected by museums including Fondation Cartier, Paris, and in the U.S. by The Met, MoMA, J. Paul Getty, Art Institute of Chicago, and our own Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Among the cache of Morell works featured at Foto Relevance — most of them large-format — the Florence interiors carry the day, photographed at such historic locations as the president of Tuscany's office in Palazzo Strozzi and the entrance to the gardens, and in the gallery of Villa La Pietra. For collectors of more somber prints, this exhibition also includes black-and-white camera obscura images taken at the medieval-era Lacock Abbey (featured in Downton Abbey and Harr y Potter movies). In the 19th century, the abbey was home to Henry Fox Talbot and the place where the world's first photographic negative was taken in 1835. "Abelardo Morell: Liminal Spaces," through August 31, at Foto Relevance, fotorelevance.com. Catherine D. Anspon FLORENTINE FLOURISH Above: Abelardo Morell's Camera Obscura: View of the Florence Duomo in Tuscany President's Office in Palazzo Strozzi, Sacrati, Italy, 2017, at Foto Relevance B otanicals rule the day at two Houston art spaces. McClain Gallery serves up classic works by Alex Katz, an American master still at the height of his game after a critically praised eight-decade retrospective at the Guggenheim. Katz's economical flattened style and lush palette explore a bounty of blossoms, from the patrician to the prosaic. Paintings on canvas, linen, panel, and board join prints including an epic silkscreen on canvas loaned from the collection of The Howard Hughes Corporation, which also underwrote Katz's site-specific 35,000-square-foot public mural Flowers at The Woodlands Waterway Square … In contrast, the Menil Drawing Institute presents the first museum retrospective posthumously for Gray Foy, an arcane American mid-century original, after his 40-year hiatus from creating art. The obsessive, idiosyncratic bon vivant was born in Dallas and educated at SMU; his glittering Manhattan bio collided with Truman Capote, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and Cecil Beaton. The exhibition is aligned with The Menil Collection's dual bequests of Foy's Surreal-tinged work. The museum is now the largest repository of the hyper-real graphite-on-paper kingdom of Foy, a universe where plants and man often merge to suggest a new botanic being. Viewers are even given magnifying glasses to decipher the meticulous and startling details. "Alex Katz: Flowers," through July 29, at McClain Gallery, mcclaingallery.com; "Hyperreal: Gray Foy," through September 3, at the Menil Drawing Institute, menil.org. Catherine D. Anspon FLORAL PAS DE DEUX Above: Gray Foy's Untitled [Illuminated Exterior with Morphing Dancers], circa 1946, at The Menil Collection. Collection of Marguerite Steed Hoffman, © Estate of Gray Foy. Photo Photographic Works, Tucson, Arizona. Alex Katz's Pink Petunia No. 1, circa 1968, at McClain Gallery