REAL-TIME FOCUS
Bernarducci Meisel Gallery

“Real-Time Focus: Redefining the Painted Landscape” brings together some two dozen tightly executed landscapes by both well-known veterans and younger artists. Robert Bechtle and Richard Estes set the tone with Photorealist paintings from the 1970s that combine strikingly conceived designs with impassively rendered elements. Most other paintings here follow their lead, showing extraordinary technique and bold imagery, but rather less interest in the internal weighting of drawing and color one finds in traditional landscapes ranging from Ruisdael to Pissarro.

Mr. Bechtle’s “68 Cadillac” (1970) elegantly contrasts a car’s reflective fenders with spiky cactus leaves and the looping commercial lettering on a wall behind. The artist radiantly renders each element as a separate entity, effectively conveying the unmindful gaudiness of a particular subculture. On the same gallery wall, Jessica Rohrer’s “Honda Civic” (2006), sets the myriad reflections in a car’s windows against the rhythms of a railing and a building’s clapboard siding, and Paul Carancias’s large 2007 canvas dramatically employs the underside of the Brooklyn Bridge to frame a view of the East River.

Colors serve mainly to enhance the preconceived designs of these works, but in others hues acquire a momentum of their own. Dense darks and pale blues and violets provide a visceral account of a pond’s contradictory reflections in Emma Tapley’s large “Inverted Treescape” (2004–05). A humming green, a livid turquoise tint, and eerie gray-pinks become the playing field, luxury boxes, and distant parked cars, respectively, in Anna Conway’s startling 2004 image of a stadium at night. Lois Dodd’s 1987 painting of frontally viewed windows pits blue-shadowed window frames against tawny interior depths. Other notable works include Rack straw Downes’s view of a rainy street intersection (1976–77), and Mr. Estes’s relatively recent painting (from 1996) of a lake’s silky ripples.

However, Wynne’s Evans’s nearly 8-foot-tall painting of a stage performance of Keats’s “The Pot of Basil” dominates the exhibition, and seems to sum up its philosophy of painting as well. In a landscape-like stage space, this canvas vividly elaborates details of actors, while neglecting the pictorial force of their larger gestures. It achieves, impressively, goals closer in spirit to the academician Gérôme’s than Veronese’s. Some viewers may find themselves lingering instead over several very small works — by Mark Innerst, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, and Stephen Hannock — which employ simple, bold palettes to nail down, palpably, the most basic aspect of a landscape: horizontal planes stretching below open sky, their meeting paced by curls of clouds.

Until July 20 (37 W. 57th St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-593-3933).