Luc Tuymans is difficult to like and harder still to ignore. Which is exactly as things should be for an artist who puts alienation at the heart of his enterprise.

The 47-year-old Belgian is probably the most influential painter of his generation. His blurry, intentionally bland and offhand pictures are so widely imitated in art schools that the critic Jerry Saltz issued a call for a four-year moratorium on the use of photographs as sources for painting, to be called the “Tuymans Rule.”

Mr. Tuymans’s sixth solo exhibition at the David Zwirner Gallery, typically, has a stated theme that is as enigmatic as any of the individual images: “Proper” purports to deal with “the crumbling state” of American current affairs. But the intriguingly eclectic range of images – a portrait of Condoleeza Rice, a still life of a timing device, a scene of a couple ballroom dancing on a marble floor sporting the state seal of Texas – hardly adds up to a “Dogville”- esque indictment of Uncle Sam.

Mr. Tuymans is, in a way, Postmodernism’s history painter. He tackles loaded political themes – past shows have taken on the Holocaust, Belgian meddling in post-colonial Congo, and the press response to the September 11, 2001, attacks – in ways that are teasingly tangential. If history is usually told from the point of view of a highly intellectual fly on the wall, Mr. Tuymans offers, instead, the take of a half asleep couch potato, subliminally aware of TV or newspaper images as he mulls over personal, prosaic concerns. “Demolition” (2005) is a cropped study of a building coming down in thick, billowing dust, which because of the implied scale with the tiny lamppost at the base might put the viewer in mind of the World Trade Center.

This is history as experienced by the numbed, the apathetic, the befuddled. His hauntingly vacant images are compelling yet elusive to the point of seeming willfully obtuse. They put you in a mood (a blue one, generally), but you come away from them with a generalized sensation rather than specific visual memories. He is not a photorealist; rather, he is trying to find through paint a metaphorical equivalent of the enervating ubiquity of the photographic image.

This is not new, of course. In his affection for blur, Mr. Tuymans recalls Gerhard Richter (Mr. Saltz’s rule was also called the “Richter Resolution”), who has made photo smudge a trademark of his “capitalist realism,” and Walter Richard Sickert, whose innovative late work found in photography a potent means of conveying the simultaneous aloofness and intimacy in the mass audience’s relationship with celebrities.

Mr. Tuymans’s “Mwana Kitoko” (2000), a portrait of a colonial official in dress uniform, is reminiscent of Sickert’s portrait of the ill-fated King Edward VIII. And the “The Secretary of State” (2005) relates to innumerable portraits from photographs by Sickert, as they do to the self-consciously Sickertian modern history painter R.B. Kitaj’s deliciously subversive monochrome portrait of Unity Mitford.

The apparent inspiration for Mr. Tuymans’s Rice portrait was the reported characterization by a Belgian politician of Ms. Rice as “strong, not unpretty.” Like Mr. Kitaj’s portrait of the cute young fascist, “The Secretary of State” evokes an erotic ambiguity: A presumably left-leaning painter is turned on by a strong, not unpretty woman who personifies policies he abhors.

Sexuality complicates political thinking the way painting complicates a straightforward snapshot. The painting has a simultaneous immediacy and otherness that comes from an empirical rendering in blown-up scale of the surface data of a photograph, which itself is not a posed, official portrait but a frozen moment of reportage.

The pervasive unease in Mr. Tuymans’s work amounts to a sublimated violence. His imagery deals with conflicts and problems obliquely: Seemingly intent on capturing the banality of evil rather than its drama, his strategy is the antithesis of the Renaissance theorist Alberti’s definition of istoria, which is to capture the most telling moment or episode that encapsulates the tale, and the moral lesson. Very little in the current show, however, seems explicitly sinister beyond the anemic colors, shaky cropping, and skewed perspectives of trees in a park, in “The Parc,” or the top of a fourposter bed, in “Courtesy” (both 2005).

In his equation of banality and violence, Mr. Tuymans represents an update of Francis Bacon. His works have none of the spasmic contortions of blood and guts that constitute Bacon’s foreground figures, but they share deadpan backgrounds of an equally disturbing blandness. Like Bacon, Mr. Tuymans doesn’t just convey violence in paint but commits a certain kind of violence toward the medium.

One of the strangest aspects of Mr. Tuymans’s project is his strict rule of finishing each painting in a single sitting. This is particularly perverse because alla prima painting is usually intended to achieve freshness and spontaneity, whereas Mr. Tuymans has more than lived up to his anti-heroic ideal of the “authentic forgery.” Far from conveying any kind of speed or dashed-off painterliness, his surfaces have a flat, matter-of-fact delivery that is usually associated with a slow, deliberate hand. But they do have a sense of belligerent unfinish and of apathetic awkwardnesses. It is as if they wanted to convey as much alienation and unease in the way they are made as in the way they will be received.

Until November 19 (525 W. 19th Street, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, 212-727-2070).