PAOLO VENTURA
The photographs in Ventura's extraordinary "War Souvenir" series, exhibited here for the first time, recreate imaginary moments toward the end of the Second World War in Italy: suicides, seductions, and deaths, as well as everyday scenes of life during wartime. Working with meticulously realistic scale-model figures, objects, and settings that he crafts himself, Ventura evokes an atmosphere of decadence and dread unusual for such fabricated setups. In spite of the work's unnecessarily large scale, its artifice is weirdly convincing, not as photojournalism but as neorealist cinema. These might be outtakes from De Sica or Rossellini films, or terribly unnerving recovered memories. Through May 20. (Hasted Hunt, 529 W. 20th St. 212-627-0008.)