SUSAN SYKES: Recent Watercolors
Bernarducci. Meisel. Gallery

For artists, the hectic succession of modern art movements makes getting out in front a horse race without a finish line. In the late 1970s, Jim Dine noted: “Much of what is called postmodernist art is made by people frightened to death of not being called new.” Susan Sykes does not frighten easily. Her response to the tyranny of pressand market-driven obsessions with novelty is to embrace a mode unarguably past its prime. She sidesteps the fallacy of progress in art by aligning herself with photorealism — then upending it.

Ms. Sykes’s first exhibition with Bernarducci. Meisel is engaging and impressive. Her paintings are based on vintage urban photography from the 1930s and ’40s. She interprets black-and-white originals in full color, replacing the objectivity of the camera with subjective harmonies and carefully considered chromatic textures.

Photorealism rests on a single technical feat: making a painting look like a photograph. Ms. Sykes turns the mechanically produced image of a photograph into a painting. She forgoes oil paint’s soft-focus blendability for the pooled edges of watercolor, a choice that places greater demands on spontaneous expertise.

The delicate, eddying hues on the rain-soaked street of “Arrow Beer” (2007) provide painterly contrast to a blackened night sky that swallows a dark sign board. Only the neon letters of the product name penetrate the gloom to hang in the air like fireworks. In “North Avenue at Charles Street, 1944 Baltimore” (2007), a yellow trolley establishes the key around which other tones find their proper place.

Photorealism is a cool style; it maintains a certain detachment from both the motif and its visual counterfeit. There is nothing cool about Ms. Sykes’s approach. It is implicitly nostalgic, an affectionate backward glance to the “look” of an era warmed by the spectrum. With emphasis on cars, fashions, movie marquees (Charlie Chaplin, Ruth Hussey, Jimmy Stewart), and billboards with bygone products (Lucky Strikes, Ruppert’s beer), time itself is the reigning motif.

On view are two decades in the history of style, removed from the seismic events of their time. Ms. Sykes reclaims documents of an era and returns them to us as art.

Maureen Mullarkey

Until April 28 (37 W. 57th St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-593-3757).

PENNY KRONENGOLD: Museum Translations, New Paintings and Drawings
First Street Gallery

The painter and sculptor Penny Kronengold, who, in her last couple of exhibitions has focused on bathers and swimming pools, has returned to the subject of the horse. First Street Gallery’s press release states that her interest in the equine was renewed after seeing the glass-encased horses and figures of the “Hindu Gate,” an installation of 17th- and 19th-century Indian sculptures at the Museum of Natural History, as well as spending time drawing from the Central Park carousel and the armored horses in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The results — oil paintings, sketchbook drawings, and two small terra-cotta sculptures — far from being academic studies, are a personal mixture of Redonesque fantasy, mythological conundrums, and military parade. The paintings’ arches, foliage, banners, nudes, horses, and riders all shake cinematically with sketchy, quivering line, and their washy, translucent atmosphere and Bonnardworthy color give the works the feeling of watercolors more than of oil paintings.

Straight out of a fairytale, the horses, painted bright red, yellow, orange, or green, leap or rear or, seemingly merging with figures, transform themselves into lines of cabaret dancers. Some of the horses appear to fly, as if they had freed themselves from the battle, the carousel, the walls of Lascaux, or the reins of Apollo’s chariot. Others, though they carry their riders with pomp and circumstance, feel like magical beings incapable of being mastered.

In the landscape “Fantasy 8” (2000–07), the prancing horses, one of which floats upside down, appear to be frolicking in the heavens. “Hindu Gate: Two Musicians and Horse” (2007), presents us with an orange interior in which a blue horse leaps through a floating doorway. The three horses and riders in “Armored Knights, Flags, and Arches” (2007), rupture forth as if from out of a starburst.

Ms. Kronengold’s sources are evident in the paintings (some of the horses retain their medieval warriors and coats of arms or carousel poles). But despite their telltale signs, the pictures elude nameable places, periods, or events. The paintings and drawings carry us with their wonderfully fluid and fervent line, and they arrive here more as incantations — enchanted pageantries that have been let loose from the artist’s mind.

Lance Esplund

Until April 21 (526 W. 26th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 646-336-8053).