The Neuberger Museum is currently hosting a mid-career retrospective of the landscape painter April Gornik. The show, curated by Dede Young, is accompanied by a catalog with an essay by Donald Kuspit, in which he compares [Ms.] Gornik to Poussin, Bernini, Van Gogh, and Van Eyck; Shakespeare, Breton, Faust, and Odysseus. Both a “mystic” and a “Romantic Conceptualist … Ms. Gornik,” writes Mr. Kuspit, “surfs light as though she were an angel familiar with its every nuance – which she is”; and she “deconstructs nature as well as society, even as she outsmarts both.” Ms. Gornik’s weaknesses are seen as strengths, even transformed into deliberate, philosophical critiques of artists past. Her every move is said to be fraught with psychological and art-historical meaning.

Certainly, great artists are great thinkers. They plan, illustrate, and execute ideas. But when this kind of lofty praise is heaped upon a weak painter such as Ms. Gornik – whose paintings lack space and light, whose ground planes do not lie down, and whose forms are without volume – it begins to feel as if the writer is dancing not with the art but with himself. An art critic once said that writing a catalog essay is like writing a love letter to an artist. But there is a point at which a critic has too much love to give to be taken seriously – that he has ceased to be a critic and has become a pen-for-hire. I was dismayed, for instance, when I read Mr. Kuspit’s absurd claim that Ms. Gornik’s canvases “are the grand climax of two centuries of modern landscape painting.”

Ms. Gornik paints dreamy, people less landscapes. At first sight, her large canvases of cloud-filled skies, open fields, deserts, woods, or bays are mildly pretty and serene. Their colors and forms – thin, weightless, and light of touch – feel as if they were barely touching their surfaces. Just large enough to be operatic, and small enough to be centerpieces in large living rooms, the paintings appear to have been designed to remain at once understated and monumental, intimate and vast.

I can see why Ms. Gornik’s paintings are seductive at their surfaces. Their colors graze the canvases. Their subjects, even when they are stormy skies, remain non-threatening and non-challenging. There is something hypnotic about the paintings’ refusal to make demands on viewers – their refusal to engage – and about their casual mixture of vacancy and grandeur. Above all else, the paintings convey a sense of distance and emptiness on a grand scale.

Created from photographs and memory, away from the subject, Ms. Gornik’s illustrative canvases suffer from a lack of information, invention, and passion. They use size as a standing for emotion, vagueness as a stand-in for sensitivity. Like sugary greeting cards given in place of genuine sentiment, the paintings are forced and contrived. They come across as self-conscious gestures that leave you more aware of what is missing than of what is there. The artist seems to want us to feel that her canvases are natural constructions in the tradition of Claude and Poussin, but they lack composition and resolution. They resemble bland, soft-focus photographs more than paintings; they remain too vague, flat, rote, and repetitive to resemble nature’s infinite variety. Ms. Gornik wants us, it seems, to see the pictures as romantic visions in the tradition of Blake or Redon. But, sappy as they are, they are not imaginative or personal enough to be convincing.

Ms Gornik’s paintings are diffusions, reductions, and generalizations, rather than explorations, of the experience before nature. Surreal and unnaturally hazy, but not enough to be fantastical, they appear to turn their backs on both the realm of fantasy and on the motif itself.

I can sense that Ms. Gornik wants to create serene landscapes and pared-down visions – like memories just out of reach. But her voice, small and redundant, cannot sustain her canvases. Their operatic scale works against their attempt to be intimate. To right the imbalance, she resorts to overstatement and the overwrought. Ms. Gornik simply does not seem to have enough powers of invention to keep a surface moving, let alone to keep alive the realm of the picture.

Mr. Kuspit compares the music of Ms. Gornik’s pictures to that of Beethoven and to that experienced in the paintings of Kandinsky. For me, the musical equivalent would perhaps be with a pop-music power ballad – music that, large and sentimental, pulls you in with its size and emotional self-indulgence, then pushes you away just as quickly with its manipulation, emotional bankruptcy, and insincerity.