What is real in painting? Not photorealism, if you think of paint as a generator of palpable forms and spaces. Not academic painting, if you hope for subject matter to surpass the totality of its technique. And not even “realistic” masters such as Chardin and Corot, unless you appreciate — as everyone should — the rich artifice of their compositions.

One of the paradoxes of painting is that naturalistic detail, carried to its logical extreme, tends to end up looking neither natural nor logical. Richard Baker manages to turn this to his advantage, however, by incorporating perfectly realized details within shrewdly distorted spaces. This might sound like one more gimmick, but Mr. Baker’s rendering skills are considerable, and with each work he seems to find new directions of attack. The result is that many of his nearly 20 paintings currently at Tibor de Nagy have an original and peculiar authority.

Mr. Baker’s canvases have grown steadily larger in recent years, but his subjects have remained mostly the same: collections of fairly ordinary objects, such as books, bits of candy, fruit, and, especially, lushly painted tulips in glass vases and bottles. All of these are almost invariably arranged on plain table surfaces in front of backgrounds of large, open skies and distant hilltops. Mr. Baker’s gift for relating qualities of light energizes these setups; the artist is especially adept at capturing the density of cast shadows, and imparting a volumetric presence to the crystalline, refracting interiors of fluid-filled glassware. In a novel twist on Cubism, however, the artist renders all these objects in disparate perspectival spaces, introducing the kind of flattening distortions one finds in Pompeiian frescoes, and the discontinuous table edges employed by Cézanne.

With its ardently modeled tumblers and liquor bottles, “Tray Gray” (2006), seems for a moment a like a conventional magic realist still life, its olives almost alarmingly alive in their minutely considered sheen. Longer inspection, however, uncovers odd-ball renderings of space: The tray’s back edge is actually longer than the front, and a knife handle is represented face-on when it should recede from the viewer, while the lettering of bottle labels fails to follow their curving surfaces.

“Pink Pearl” (2006) wondrously captures the luminous innards of a bottle of Smirnoff, a tumbler, and a jar of pickles, contrasting them effectively with the soft opacity of chunks of orange cheese. The crowd of pickles peering through the glass jar and the cheese’s nibbled edges lend the image an almost uncomfortable physicality. But reality, such as it is in these images, stops there. Immediately beyond these objects, the edges of the table and the glimpsed shoreline beyond tilt crazily, as if the entire remainder of the world were a hall of mirrors.

More often, though, table surfaces and background sky practically join as anonymous fields accommodating Mr. Baker’s strongly modeled objects. This gambit can be effective. In “Flowers” (2007), for instance, four sets of ravishingly detailed tulips, rising from separate vessels, sway hypnotically above a gray plane that slips relatively indifferently from table to sea and sky.

The concept of combining vivid, lifelike modeling with tortured perspectives wears thin in places. The extreme tilt of a fruit bowl in “The Real and the Fake” (2006), for instance, is so out of kilter in the spatial structure that it seems appended from another canvas. At such points one misses the taut modesty of the artist’s earlier, smaller paintings.

Other canvases fare better. My personal favorites at Tibor are animated by a tense circulation of forms: the light and dark vases, with their lustrous surfaces, perambulating about a center of overlapping catalogues in “Table of Contents” (2007), for example, or the series of stacked books muscularly pacing the width of “Dusk of Dawn” (2006). Such canvases contain echoes of the powerful cadences of Juan Gris — an inspiration for Mr. Baker, judging from his inclusion of a detail from a Gris still life in a painting some years back. As elsewhere in the show, the distorted perspectival spaces in these paintings remind us that naturalism is no prerequisite for pictorial conviction.

What do the distant plume of smoke in “Between the Clock and the Bed” (2006), or the insect books and soft-core pornographic photographs in “The Table (Hello Morning!)” (2007) signify? Mr. Baker’s paintings are full of private meanings, and also witty asides, such as his affixing of a postage stamp to a Playboy model’s tongue in “Shade” (2007). His predilection for painting images of photographs and shiny ceramic fruit demonstrates, perhaps a little too obviously, painting’s contradictory capabilities of purveying the real. Ultimately, however, these seem like little more than diversions in a process that, essentially, is any painter’s: the selecting, omitting, focusing, and summing up of elements as necessary for an intuitive, gathering order. Mr. Baker has hit upon a felicitous combination of conventional modeling and eccentric spaces that suits his purposes well.

Until June 29 (724 Fifth Ave., between 56th and 57th streets, 212-262-5050).