The idea that a certain kind of chaos, a madness, afflicts us due to the vagaries of the modern world could be the starting point to the themes underlining two solo shows opening up. That madness is not always bad, but it can be extreme and incomprehensible, like the world we live in.

At the Snitzer Gallery, a fairly recent BFA New World grad, Mauricio Gonzalez, will get his first solo show, “Speed of Life,” opening on Tuesday, Jan. 10. The exhibit will be comprised of sculptures, crafted from found, raw materials in a rudimentary way as to highlight the construction and what’s behind our modern constructs. The Snitzer gallery describes Gonzalez’s exploration into that chaotic contemporary life, one that vacillates “from insecurity, to anxiety, to ecstasy,” through his sculptures “whose discord, harshness and even violence defy fixity or repose while they simultaneously tease us with the possibility of a tentative balance and the harmony for which we all yearn.”

Richard Höglund’s “Hysterical. Sublime.” at Gallery Diet, which opens Jan. 6, addresses the inner and outer worlds of today, and the tension and paradoxes between them. Höglund is a recent graduate of the École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg, France, who has studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He has shown at Diet several times in the past. There is always somewhat of a performance element to his work, and “Hysterical. Sublime.” incorporates drawing, photography and video in an exhibit that asks whether the “quintessential abyss is within rather than without? If we are not so much on the edge of the infinite as we are chained to the rock of its indescribable epicenter?” There is a madness, and a comfort, in searching for the sublime, no matter where it is encountered.

Mauricio Gonzalez’s “Speed of Life” opens Jan. 10 and runs through Feb. 4 at Snitzer Gallery, 2247 N.W. First Place, Wynwood; snitzer.com. “Richard Höglund: Hysterical. Sublime.” opens Jan. 6 and runs through Feb. 11 at Gallery Diet, 174 N.W. 23rd St., Wynwood; gallerydiet.com.