Art in Brief

ON BOARD
Lori Bookstein Fine Art

If it is summer, it must be Zeuxis. A loose association of still life painters, Zeuxis assembles several shows a year that go on the road, often to regional museums and college galleries. But every summer for the past few years, Zeuxis has been in New York. This is the group's second guest exhibition at Lori Bookstein Fine Art. Some highly accomplished contemporary painters exhibit under the Zeuxis umbrella.

Styles on view are as diverse as the 34 artists included here. Nevertheless, there is a common seriousness toward craft and love of the pictorial possibilities of still life — once dismissed as mere recordings of lowly objects — that binds disparate talents into a gratifying whole.

Laid tables are the genre's staple. Victor Pesce cheats a bit by hanging his motif — a single square box — on the wall. It is a resonant move that offers a deliberately modern successor to the hanging game convention (that Still Life With Dead Partridge familar to Dutch and French masters). John Goodrich, a fellow critic for The New York Sun, is represented by a lively tabletop arrangement with an open-work white ceramic bowl that parts the alizarin field behind it. Lynn Kotula brings up to date the device of the painting-within-a-painting. Her robust still life setup is staged in front of one of her own preparatory drawings.

Eve Mansdorf, Lucy Barber Ken Kewley, Ruth Miller, and Tim Kennedy are among my favorite painters. The dominant blue scale of Mr. Kennedy's "Striped Vase" is gracefully warmed by a yellow striped pillow and punctuated by the red marking on a playing card Forms dissolve in Ms. Miller's "Blue Pitcher." The projection and recession of planes are left ambiguous to emphasize the free movement of lush color notes.

Both Ms. Mansdorf and Ms Barber are tonal painters who bring a rare sense of poetry to the act of depiction. Ms. Mansdorf's "Bok Choy and Lemon 1" (2007) is loosely handled, but fidelity to reality holds in the truth of her colors and the shimmer of modulated shadows. A honeyed light seasoned with lemon, mutes the contours of Ms. Barber's delicate shelf arrangement poised against a yellow wall. Bevin Engman's arrangement of standing books puts representation to suggestive purposes and creates a mysterious architecture.

I regret not having enough column space to comment on each felicitous entry. Come see for yourself. Pick the artists that appeal to you and make an effort to follow them. You will not be disappointed.

Until July 27 (37 W. 57th St. at Fifth Avenue, 212-750-0949).