The paintings of Mounia Dadi, an artist born in Casablanca , Morocco , exemplify the eclectic pleasures to be found in “The Rapture of Form,” at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street , in Chelsea , from June 26 through July 17. (Reception: Thursday, June 28, 6 to 8 pm.
 Dadi's paintings recall Walt Whitman's famous line, “I contain multitudes,” for she fills gracefully delineated outlines of the human form with myriad neo-pointillist strokes of color that suggest the intricate content  of our inner lives. Set against vibrant backgrounds of a single hue, Dadi “sings the body electric,” to paraphrase another line from that great American poet.
 Working with steel, bronze, glass, and other materials, the California funk sculptor William C. Mang celebrates lowbrow culture, creating iconic tributes to heavy metal music (a carnivorous-looking anthropomorphic electric guitar with  frets culminating in a claw like hand!), Goth, sci-fi, dungeons and dragons, aliens--you name it! Mang's Pop wit succeeds by virtue of an elegance of execution that elevates even the most debased subjects to the level of high art.
A mysterious epiphany in Italy prompted Gregory Allen Page to abandon a lucrative career in reconstructive surgery and become a painter. Now, living and working in Chicago , Page paints thickly impastoed canvases notable for their raw power and expressive brushwork, whether he is depicting a stylized vision of an exotic deity held aloft by beams of light or what appears to be a field of hemp waving in the breeze.
 For her choice of sunny hues, the Israeli painter Nava Revital resembles a latter-day Bonnard, particularly in her domestic subjects such as “The Living Room 2.” Living in the melting pot of Jerusalem, however, she has an even wider range of subjects at her disposal, and she captures them in a dynamic style that moves gracefully from the figurative into the semi-abstract and back again, offering us what de Kooning once termed “slippery glimpses” of daily life.
 By contrast, Washington resident Bergen Rose imbues the everyday with a hint of the surreal in her atmospheric landscapes, where fields and twisted trees have an otherworldly quality akin to the desolate dreamscapes of Yves Tanguy. A sense of poetic melancholy pervades Rose's paintings, lending them an unusual emotive quality.
 The Egyptian artist Nadia El Tatawy has a talent for cramming a complex narrative suggestiveness into her boldly brushed, darkly evocative figurative paintings. The  history of her country, its rich cultural heritage and its ongoing human conflicts, has formed Tatawy's sensibility and influenced her art indelibly, lending her earthly evocations of the human figure a rare resonance.
 Anyone who has ever driven through the postindustrial landscape of upstate New York factory towns like the one in which Michael Hibbard grew up will recognize their spirit if not their actuality in his minimalist sculptures, which combine steel and ceramics in innovative ways. For while they are geometric and completely nonobjective, Hibbard's stark looming forms convey an elegiac quality, standing as affecting monuments to a vanishing way of life, even while impressing us with their purely formal attributes.
 As mellow in their subtle intonations as sun-bleached driftwood, the watercolors of Marc van der Leeden evoke the phantom poetry of old New England beach houses and lighthouses set against pale, uninflected skies. However, there is more to these pictures than nostalgic Americana . A practicing physician like the late poet William Carlos Williams, van der Leeden is a homespun modernist, employing light and shadow to create subtle patterns on the picture plane that combine elements of Impressionism and Cubism in a highly original synthesis.