Bathers on shorelines have inspired many a painter, from Cézanne to Picasso to Prendergast. And no wonder — the motif combines some of the most exquisite potentialities of gesture and sunlight. Contemporary painter James Farrelly (b. 1959), too, has dedicated himself to the subject, and 12 of his recent efforts currently appear in his first solo exhibition at Lohin Geduld.

Mr. Farrelly’s more than two decades as a resident of Rome show in these paintings’ sunny lyricism. The intensity of his palette, however — dominated by vivid carmine hues, orange-reds, and yellow-greens against cerulean and cobalt blues of water — is a more recent development, dating from his past eight years as a Brooklyn resident. Rapidly brushed or spread with a palette knife, these colors build in semiabstracted patchworks that turn, before one’s eyes, into groupings of beachgoers, blankets, and umbrellas.

Contours and colors fizz appealingly in these canvases; they have a kind of mute brilliance, thanks to a generality of description that simplifies gestures and reduces faces and hands to plots of color. In this respect, they resemble Prendergast’s blocked-in compositions — though electrified in hue — or busier, breezier versions of Robert de Niro Sr.’s boldly colored arabesques. To be sure, the rendering in Farrelly’s paintings, viewed together, can seem at times almost too breezy, as if the artist were periodically losing himself in local sensations at the expense of a climactic, gathering impression. More often, though, the paintings seduce with their enthusiasm of color and execution.

Among the most impressive works is “Pink Dress” (2007), in which variously posed figures sit around a central standing woman, whose orangey skin tones and deep pink garment hold with beautifully simple resolve before the horizontals of sand and water. Ideas of composition find natural fulfillment in impulses of hue, with the ground plane succinctly separating the notes of a cadmium red blanket and the playful, zigzagging lights and darks of a seated male figure. The canary yellow sky and deep cerulean water handsomely set off the absorptive shadowiness of the woman’s pillar-like form.

Details of other paintings intrigue. In “By Sand and Sea” (2007), for instance, a distant beach chair — a delicate, sunlight-gorged pink — nestles up against the darker tones of a figure in the middle ground. And in “Yellow Sea” (2007), this intensity of perception powerfully leverages the entire scene, with medium-toned verticals of figures punctuating a band of flaming yellow extending the canvas’ full width.

One senses the artist’s considerations of form in other paintings — in, say, buckets placed at the feet of standing figures to anchor their verticality, or dogs darting to fill bright intervals between figures. These notions of classical composition, however, are not always fully realized in plastic rhythms of color; the poignant passages of “By Sand and Sea,” for example, are connected by indefinite color pressures that assume rather than state the distances between figures. At such moments, the artist seems to putter a little too contentedly through his compositions, with a once-overness that matches, uncomfortably, the rapid facility of his palette knife strokes.

But the artist redeems himself with a sequence in “Ball Time” (2007) that luminously captures a woman spreading a towel beneath the unyielding horizontal of ocean. This detail shows how a few casual, almost naïve, notes can convey the graceful wholeness of a pose; it finds its beginning, compellingly, in the tiny, faint note of a sandal strap.

Until April 19 (531 W. 25th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-675-2656).