In the darkened gallery, spotlights cast theatrical halos around four sculptures of ancient plants and a single large seahorse. They appear before you as if summoned from a nether-realm where surreal clones of our world thrive in mockery of the mortality that plagues all living creatures.

Visually, they are spectacular -- evil almost -- a diabolic scheme of trickery and illusion. Hardest to bear, perhaps, is that the objects are more beautiful than their living, earthly counterparts. What's more, Edmier has used a mind-blowing technique to fabricate the sculptures -- they are cast from life in molten basalt lava.

The masterpiece of the show is Cycas Orogeny, a large sculpture of a male and female cycad with their reproductive organs rendered bare and throbbing in vivid red and yellow, a bold contrast to the deep molten gray of the sculpture's body. A primordial tree coveted by botanists and movie stars as the crowning gem of their arboretums, the cycad is a rare and ancient genus that has inspired a small industry of specialist thieves.

Edmier's sculpture costs around $250,000. The actual tree, if a rare species, can fetch up to $100,000 on the black market -- not too great a difference. One wonders which would be preferred by Huysmans' decadent hero, Duc Jean Floressas des Esseintes.

Apropos to Huysmans Against Nature, the new show at James Cohan Gallery also addresses the five senses, prompting the viewer to the brink of synesthesia. (Five possible art mediums are also represented: installation, sculpture, video, drawing-painting and photography.)

Vito Acconci's photowork, Trademarks, documents a 1970 performance in which the artist sat naked, Indian-style, making bite marks in his own skin. Perhaps more tempting is Janine Antoni's chocolate bust, the non-soapy part of Lick and Lather (1993-94). Another tasty piece is Untitled, Blue Placebo, a candy carpet by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, installed beneath 13,000 (1996), a painting by Fred Tomaselli that is made with innumerable stacked aspirin pellets.

The element of chance in the works of John Cage serves as muse to George Quasha, whose exhibition of new sculptures, titled "Axial Stones and Drawings," embody a reoccurring theme in his works -- the notion of the axial. Like the I-Ching that guided the decisions in Cage's New River Watercolors on view in the front of the gallery, Quasha's axial is an invisible line that draws and links together the natural forms of his sculptures.

In her latest installation at Matthew Marks, Katharina Fritsch translates her typically confrontational, colorful and solid sculptures into a whimsical inventory of French cultural symbols. The gallery walls are lined with large blue-toned posters depicting the Eiffel Tower, Hector Guimard's Metro entrance and other postcard images of Paris, part of the obligatory decor for any Americanized French Bistro. The ceiling is a rain shower of purple, black, white and green umbrellas, all cast in carbon (and esthetically similar to Fritsch's past production).

A century before, Jacques-Louis David and the other Neoclassicists appropriated myth in order to ennoble the military ambitions of Napoleon. Böcklin, as did James Joyce with Ulysses, used mythology to expose the flaws and mediocrity of the modern world, opening the door to a new realm of visual fantasy. The show also delves into the grotesque in the guise of satire and caricature in the works of artists like Lyonel Feninger, Thomas Theodor Heine and Emil Nolde.