Melanie Johnson shakes you awake at Kiosk

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To watch someone sleep is to balance between adoration and obsession — the same narrow yet peaceful perch where Melanie Johnson has painted “So That the Universe Comes Out Even.”

In the canvases that make up her oil diptych — part of her Kiosk Gallery exhibition, titled Sleep — dream logic overtakes perspective, distorting the depth of field behind two figures twisted in oneiric … bliss? fear? pain? The one dominating the upper canvas appears caught in an impressively full-bodied act of removing a shirt. Defying gravity, the right leg curls at once toward you and away; a ridge of spine under exposed skin invites and eludes touch, bridging lucid reality with dreamy unknowns. There’s a planted foot, but is it touching the ground? Beyond the hinge of the hips in that impossible pose, darkness seeps from the canvas. A cloud of black paint closes in from the right, chasing an Impressionist sky off the left side of the canvas. Nightmares are revving up before sleep begins, ready to race reality over the edge. As your eyes follow the dark trail down, the head of the top figure disappears into the splotchy fog of a REM cycle.

In the bottom half of Johnson’s diptych, a figure reclines in a more familiar, restful-seeming pose. Look again, though, and the ease vanishes. The forced angles of her arms, the pinched curl of her toes — this is a fitful, dramatic trance. Under this thrashing figure is a patterned quilt, an object temporarily stripped of its comforting power. Bedtime ritual wasn’t enough to stave off whatever is flashing under her eyelids.

But for all the darkness in “So That the Universe Comes Out Even,” there is tenderness and love. The negative space that swirls between the two figures suggests a timeline, a movement toward the dawn. As Johnson shifts her background from an indistinct green to the shadowy pattern of a bedspread, she guides her figures and her viewer into, and through, the night. Her rendition of human flesh, a particularly intoxicating strength here, finds the blushes and rashes of imperfect skin; heat emanates from a heavy thigh, one weighted with honest muscle and fat, as a real thigh under gravity is. A body at rest remains a body in a kind of motion.

To be intimately close to a sleeping being is to remain far removed from a bedmate’s immediate experience of unconsciousness. This is one of the perplexities of companionship — and the most affecting takeaway of the show. As woven as sleep is into our existence, its pieces — its flashes and dreams and hypnagogic jerks — never quite connect, as Johnson reminds us with her diptych format. If there’s no way to close this gap, there is at least this painting to suggest meaning within the divide, within the dream.