In the most unforgettable picture in this thrilling show, the Belgian artist Léon Spilliaert stands in a dimly lit room and stares straight at — or through — you. It is difficult to be certain because his eyes are shrouded in darkness, just washes of black. In a neat suit, with hair aglow, he is unworldly. It was 1908, he was 27, largely self-taught and ambitious, an illustrator now creating symbolically charged works on paper with ink, watercolor, pastel and the like.

Spilliaert lived in the seaside city of Ostend, where the painter James Ensor (1860-1949) spent most of his life. If Ensor was a master of manic anxiety (menacing clowns, mad skeletons), his younger peer was a specialist in brooding. His coastlines bend and recede until they disappear in lonesome, twilit beach scenes. In one, water laps at the feet of two girls, who are really just black silhouettes, far removed from the faint hotel in the distance.

The exhibition, curated by Noémie Goldman, of the Agnews gallery in Brussels, charts Spilliaert’s range with about two dozen works from the 1900s and ’10s. A brightly lit scene of a woman doing needlework harbors an array of virtuosic marks, while a large bottle is shadowy, unknowable. (A portrait of his perfumer father?)

Spilliaert’s world can feel at once Romantic, overwrought, gothic, proto-surreal and yet true to life. Doom is barely held in abeyance, sometimes not at all. Four bodies are strung up in a tree in a piece inspired by François Villon’s 15th-century “Ballad of the Hanged Men.” A putrid yellow sun is shining, and the tree’s roots are spreading in every direction. ANDREW RUSSETH

Chinatown

Adriana Ramic

Through March 22. David Peter Francis, 35 East Broadway, Third Floor, Manhattan; 646-669-7064, davidpeterfrancis.com.