ABSTRACTION IS a lovely mind game, and more so in the hands of a talented artist. What seems to be (especially in the case of minimalist work) the removal of all the clues we expect–narrative, emotional–is, in fact, a laying bare of something infinitely more interesting.

This tension is eminently true of a show called Introductions, up this month at Howard House. Introductions features the work of William Harris and Leo Saul Berk, and at first glance the artists couldn’t be more different. To begin with, Harris is a painter, and Berk is what I would probably call a sculptor. But the place they end up–in abstraction’s terms–is remarkably similar.

Berk makes constructions out of plywood, which he takes apart and puts together again. There is always a pleasant tension between the wood’s natural-ness (the grain, the knotholes) and its status as an object remade, both by lumberyard and then by artist. He often highlights both by filling in knotholes with tinted epoxy resin, and then flooding the piece with more resin, to a glossy finish that you just want to lick.

Berk’s works in Introductions have a kind of architectural quality, especially visible in a set made from hollow-core doors cut apart and assembled so their cardboard-accordion insides are visible. The result looks a lot like a maquette for a Bauhaus office building. Once you see how the doors have been cut into strips, how the artist has hidden the important side (the outside) and revealed the unknown (the insides), it’s impossible not to imagine them fitting back together; Berk helps you see this with more tinted epoxy, which creates a set of pleasing visual links. But the work is more than a wood puzzle: Once you’re past the mystery of how it’s done, you arrive at the other thing it has to offer, a kind of visual philosophy, or answer to a philosophical question that has something to do with the difference between space and void, purpose and essence.

If the work weren’t so smart, Berk would be a dancing poodle, praised more for innovation or training than for talent. But his eye, in fact, is impeccable. He sees the formal possibilities in these materials and brings them out so that we see them; and we see other things, such as the architecture inside a door, or the neat, organic minimalism of corrugated cardboard. You wouldn’t think that a wood product would have any kind of organic figure in it (unless you were remembering an acid trip from 20 years ago–but that’s another story), or enough ego to sustain it in works as spare as these, but it does, and it does. I can’t wait to see what Berk sees next.

Harris’ square paintings are made of layers of acrylic paint squeegeed across the canvas, allowed to dry only partially before the next layer goes on. In terms of possibilities for self-limitation, Harris seems almost heroically monk-like: He uses only red, blue, and yellow. Far from being an academic exercise, however, these paintings are luminous–ruby and grass and yellow-brown; they only need to be much, much larger for one to feel something like the awe Mark Rothko’s paintings elicit. The light plays across the paintings, pausing for shorter and longer moments in the squeegee striations, some faint, some obvious. But one of the most compelling elements of Harris’ paintings is on the sides of the canvas, where you see overlapping layers of paint end in thick globs where the squeegee deposited them. This proof of the work, this evidence of the hand behind the glowing surface, is eminently satisfying. The surface color, with all its depth, devolves into its three basic elements. You see how the simplest colors mix to complex effect. You want to grab hold of one of the globs and see if the color comes off in one smooth sheet.

So Harris starts with a canvas and Berk starts with a door, and both end up with glossy surfaces that allow you glimpses of how they’re made. Neither artist feels the need to conceal his process; they’re too accomplished to rely on mystery. I suppose there are only so many times I can say that one of the pleasures of abstract art is the pleasure the artist takes in his materials, but I’ll say it one more time. It’s warranted here.