Tom Burckhardt and Kathy Butterly

Peanut butter and jelly. Trinidad and Tobago. Bogie and Bacall. Some things are just meant to be together. The husband-and-wife exhibition at the Bernard Toale Gallery is a case in point. Walking into the display of Tom Burckhardt's paintings and Kathy Butterly's ceramics, all I could think was peas and carrots.

Both artists claim their recent tour of Asia as inspiration for the pieces on display and their artists' statements certainly reflect a shared intent: he is experimenting "in an attempt to see if everything can inhabit the same visual space," she calls her sculptures "collages," each one "a conglomerate of many passing ideas." Burckhardt works with enamel on wood-his paintings, all roughly the size of a sheet of notebook paper, are slick, colorful meditations somewhere between Dr. Seuss and Kandinsky. He often allows shapes in the underpainting to flicker through the top layer of images, struggling for more dimensions than his medium allows.

Butterly's toy-sized ceramics successfully translate similar ideas into three-dimensional space. Each of her pieces is based around a roughly cylindrical blob of clay frozen in a state of writhing, blooming and collapsing-intricate and really quite elegant. In both cases, however, the "Asian" influence is a touch heavy-handed: Burckhardt seems to like cherry blossoms and dragons, while his wife incorporates those little bearded toothy-smiley dogs into a few of her pieces. The press release calls them Chinese Fu dogs, but, with Butterly's vivid glazes, flea market chintz is a more accurate description.

Indeed, color seems to have had its way with these artists; each piece is a miniature explosion against the gallery's stark white walls. The blues in the paintings are lovely, though underused and overshadowed by duller oranges and greens. Butterly's glazes would make a Crayola crayon envious, as well they should after a reported 15 firings.

The genius of this exhibit is more in the pairing of talents (surprisingly, this is the couple's first joint show) than in the works themselves, proof that sometimes the variations can be more interesting than the original theme.