Experimental film artist Jeremy Blake left his clothes, wallet, and a note on a Rockaway beach and walked alone into the surf at dusk on July 17. His body was found five days later in the waters off Sea Girt, N.J. Blake, who was born in 1971 in Fort Sill, Okla., committed suicide one week after the suicide of his longtime companion, the writer and filmmaker Theresa Duncan. When he did so, we lost much more than a talented voice: We lost a visionary who gave us an inimitable, looking-glass view into our recent past — yet his was a lens firmly grounded in our present. Blake’s brief career — comprising approximately two dozen abstract and narrative films, numerous digital C-prints, as well as handmade drawings and paintings — is the subject of a riveting memorial exhibition at Kinz, Tillou, & Feigen.

In the main gallery are more than half a dozen of Blake’s long, horizontal digital C-prints that span the artist’s career. These are not stills from his films, but rather moody collages that inspired or were inspired by them. Like scrapbooks, they act as memory triggers for the thousands of images in the videos. The last C-print he created is “Hobhouse” (2006). Part science fiction, part Broadway, part grandma’s doilies, “Hobhouse” is a lush and lacy abstract stage animated with linear neon. Also on view is the small installation “Golem (Group 2)” (2005). It is a reminder of the dozens of framed images — the artist’s drawings, paintings, photographs, notes, collages, storyboards, and even his own childhood drawings — that were the guts of each film and would often fill the entrance to Feigen Contemporary during the exhibitions of each of Blake’s new videos.

The show also includes the artist’s unfinished last film, “Glitterbest,” which was begun in 2006 and is the central subject of the one-person exhibit, “Wild Choir: Cinematic Portraits by Jeremy Blake,” that opened in October at Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art. The soundtrack of “Glitterbest,” written by Blake and narrated by Malcolm McLaren, is complete, but the 11-minute film’s imagery remains merely a visual framework. “Glitterbest,” an abstract portrait of Mr. McLaren, is as much a tongue-in-cheek romp through the British punk period defined by the Sex Pistols (Mr. McLaren was the band’s manager), as it is a witty, starry-eyed nursery rhyme about the rise and fall of the British Empire.

The true draw of the memorial exhibition, and of Blake’s oeuvre, however, is the ongoing screening of Blake’s complete films. Only one film, regrettably, is shown per day, except on Monday when, by appointment, requests can be made. (The schedule is available on the gallery’s Web site.)

A number of pioneering video artists working in the 1990s did not seem to know what the medium should be. They had less of a handle on experimental film than did the very artists, such as Léger, who invented the medium in the early 20th century. Video artists in the 1990s pushed film in numerous directions simultaneously — toward documentary, music video, slapstick, performance art, mock commercial, home movie, and art film. And many of them still do. Blake, however, was not confused.

Trained as a painter at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at the California Institute of the Arts, Blake understood that the screen was a rectangle in which moving images must be composed. Treating the screen like a sometimes-narrative, sometimes-abstract, moving painting, Blake danced: He pulsed, elongated, merged, bled, and melted colored geometry within the rectangle; yet he embraced his interests — early modernist abstract and color field painting; Ellsworth Kelly’s color shapes; Robert Irwin’s scrims; James Rosenquist’s “F-111”; the films of Andrei Tarkovsky; Bob Dylan’s lyrics; Robert Redford; James Bond; Playboy bunnies; Star Wars; the moon landing, and his childhood memories of the televised war in Vietnam, just to name a few. They were allowed to surface, flash, and to dance along with him. Blake’s films, like fluorescent hot irons, brand images into your brain. Those images — composed as if through free association and incantation — flash on the stage of our collective unconscious, eliciting a flood of history, memory, and popular culture.

Blake’s films, which begin as narrative stories created by the artist and then abstracted into architectonic or psychedelic dreamscapes, were fluid and rhythmic from the beginning. But they also had a finger on the pulse of a generation.

Blake was obsessed with the 1960s and 1970s, the decades that defined his preteen years. Yet he helped to delineate a contemporary aesthetic. To be infatuated, artistically or otherwise, with the time period of one’s youth is not particularly unusual or interesting. Each of us is enslaved, to one degree or another, to the popular culture of our childhoods. But to come of age as an artist during our age of sampling and appropriation and to be able to make something personal, crazy, poetic, and more than just broadly appealing — as Blake did — is another thing entirely.

The earliest films Blake composed, those of the late 1990s, are leisurely and methodical, almost skeletal, clinical, and mechanical. But they are smooth. Most of his films deal with California subjects. And their collective tone is California film noir. The “Bungalow 8” film series explores, from outside in, Blake’s imaginary view of the Beverly Hills Hotel. The video comprises slow fades, animated stills, and sliding panels — reminiscent of the opening and closing, swooshing doors in “Star Trek.” Without a hint of irony, “Bungalow 8,” like his other films, feels as if it is a melancholy — almost gingerly if not elegiac — look back at our 1960s sci-fi projection of the future.

“Chemical Sundown” (2001), based on the book “Den of Thieves” and referring to the beautiful, smog-induced Los Angeles sunsets, begins as a Morris Louis painting and melds into a tie-dyed rainbow of waves, dunes, mudslides, and fault lines. Yet it is in the most recent and best of Blake’s films — “The Winchester Trilogy” (2002), “Reading Ossie Clark” (2003), and “Sodium Fox” (2005) — that Blake really let loose and found his voice. They are fast-paced, saturated, surreal, and dreamy. They flood the mind as well as the senses. And they are layered in depth as well as breadth. Image evolves or pours out of image, as if we were witnessing the birth of popular symbols and icons. “The Winchester Trilogy,” which explores the Winchester mansion, is an epic American poem with nearly Whitmanesque proportions. “Reading Ossie Clark,” which explores the diaries of the fashion designer, who dressed Twiggy and hung out with the Rolling Stones, is an abstract, hallucinatory trip through drugs, sex, violence, and rock ‘n’ roll. But it, like all of Blake’s films, does more than refer to the past. Many contemporary artists, not just those of Blake’s generation, regurgitate the popular culture and art of the 1960s and 1970s. Kitsch is king. This has a lot to do with the contemporary art world’s “how-lowbrow-can-we-go” fascination with the cheesy and the pop. But it is also a reflection of the fact that today’s young artists, filling galleries with 1960s and 1970s memorabilia, can get back in touch with the period that defined their youths as well as their parents’ virile adulthoods, in one artistic fell swoop.

But whereas so many artists ironically or nostalgically refer to, riff on, make fun of, and reposition the popular culture of that period, Blake immersed himself in those decades as if in a liquid dream. Quentin Tarantino, an influence on Blake, is probably the most entertaining filmmaker to revisit those decades. But in Mr. Tarantino’s films, we are always made aware of the director: He is entertaining, encyclopedic, and enormously clever — as clever as they come — and his films rarely ever let us forget it.

In Blake’s videos, there is no self-consciousness. He does more than pay homage. He is a journeyman, a mad poet exploring his youth. He revisits, re-examines, and reclaims his formative years, creating synesthetic films that meld biography, music, and painting in lyric, hypnotic, psychedelic stews. And immersed in Blake’s films, we swim romantically inward — rise to a simmering boil — right along with him.

Until January 5 (529 W. 20th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-929-0500).