John Eric Byers in Gallery Naga

It's John Eric Byers month in the Boston area. Gallery NAGA has filled the space with the artist's latest pieces; the gallery show is a companion to a retrospective of the furniture maker's work at the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton.

Byers, who lives in upstate New York, is at 45 considered a leader of a new generation of studio furniture artists. His pieces at NAGA are a spectacle of design. He marries a painter's attention to surface with a craftsman's devotion to function. Byers has always made chairs and cabinets with carved and painted patterns that serve up a high-octane visual buzz. The furniture pieces are so streamlined and almost Shaker-like in their design, their simplicity makes a great canvas for patterns.

In the past, Byers's palette has been hot-toned and harlequin, with flashy colors in checkerboard patterns. His palette has toned down. The works at NAGA are almost all in shades of cream and coffee, brushed on in milk paint. He built them all using two forms: the circle and the square.

"Sitting Dresser" is an original design that makes perfect sense: a two-towered bureau with a bench in the middle so you can sit down and put on your socks. Crafted from mahogany, as all Byers's work is, this piece pulses with bull's-eyes over horizontal lines on the front of each drawer, as well as down the sides and on

more: boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2004/10/29/fur (117)

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