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The Ultimate Aloneness. Last week Manhattan's Staempfli Gallery opened an exhibition of Delvaux paintings, each of which casts a spell completely independent of sexual connotation. What at first might look like salacious humor turns out to be powerfully suggestive in a wholly different way. In Nocturne (opposite), the viewer's eye sweeps past the two somnambulant nudes, is carried across a terrace that is as desolate as the moon, ends up on a lonely mountaintop that looms against an empty sky. In Delvaux's enigmatic world, a street can turn into a maze leading to no one knows where; the manholes that often appear suggest a secret world beneath; a mirror on a sidewalk reflects a world that cannot be seen. Even Delvaux's people seem locked in other worlds and held there in solitary confinement—the ultimate in aloneness. As purely "poetic compositions," Delvaux's paintings can delight; but they are all so full of chilling secrets that they rarely fail to haunt.