James Rosenquist is a painter’s Pop painter. Although he’s as immersed as any Pop artist in the crassness and standardization of mass culture, and as prone to the moral ambiguities that arise from his embrace of the vacuous, he remains a consummate painter in his dealings with advertisements, products, and new technologies. He stands out in terms of virtuosity and inventiveness.

Mr. Rosenquist’s works now on show at Acquavella, “monochromes” (grisaille would be a better term) spanning the early 1960s to the 1990s, offer a radical contrast with the later works by Roy Lichtenstein at Mitchell-Innes & Nash and Gagosian. For all his slick styling and visual panache, Lichtenstein was an anti-artist who debunked aesthetic experience by rendering the world in the banal, chirpy language of the comic strip.

Mr. Rosenquist is the opposite: His painterliness triumphs, even when he directly appropriates advertisements and eschews color in his emulation of newsprint. Early Rosenquists were classic Pop. But beyond the sudden impact and coldness of these images, there is a complexity and pictorial involvement that slows down the way the images work. If he indeed sought aesthetic denial, he must be cursed with a Midas touch.

A piece titled “1947-1948-1950” (1960) features a row of three bow- and neckties from the given years. Each image focuses on a cropped section of jacket, shirt, tie, and chin, almost in the style of a science textbook; the dates are rendered in crudely approximated stencil lettering at the base of each segment.

The source for this enigmatic image was a Life magazine article on President Truman’s wardrobe, which “progressed” in the years cited from the personal, eccentric expressions suggested by a dapper bow or a busy pattern to the slick, sharp focus of a monochrome solid. If the first two ties are a dialectic, the third presents a synthesis heralding the cool, masculine impersonality of the 1950s – a style mirrored in the chromatic denial of Mr. Rosenquist’s knowingly bland handling.

“Pushbutton” (1960-61) is transparent and opaque at the same time. A diptych of two equal canvases, it has the immediacy and ubiquity of a poster or a succession of cinematic images, but is disconcertingly hard to read. The differ ent image frames are of irregular size and overlap the support. To the left are the lower parts of a woman’s legs, in gray against gray, with radically cropped intimations of her shoes and fragmented black pebble shapes spied behind her. Abutting this image, at a very different scale, is the close-up of a sinewy hand. Forming a predella at the base of the painting are a row of buttons, perhaps from a jukebox, suggesting that the woman’s splayed ankles are caught dancing. But that is to force an interpretation of an image that frustrates each reading it begins to suggest.

A pair of kinetic images from 1966, “Yellow Applause” and “Red Applause,” each consist of two canvases depicting hands that slide back and forth along a track in a clapping movement. The actual painted images capture a more elastic sense of motion, in a blurry, photographic, almost X-ray way, at a very different speed from these clunky mechanics. To a technologically mid-20th-century imagination, monochrome invokes celluloid, and is more convincing in capturing a sense of the photographic snapshot or of cinematic blur.

These works, along with “Spaghetti (Grisaille)”(1965),reveal a painterly infatuation with slipperiness, which in part has to do with the ability of paint to convey movement and thus imply time. The allure of such complexity has only increased as Mr. Rosenquist has aged. “Time Dust – Black Hole”(1992), a 35-foot-long mural from a private collection, is a monumental meditation on space and trash. Echelons of pencils, a glistening soda can, a tuba, and otherworldly detritus are suspended in the spray-gunned galaxy.

***

Robert Bordo, like Mr. Rosenquist, derives a particular poetry from chromatic and tonal restraint and seemingly modest intentions and slightness of means. Mr. Bordo’s intimations of landscape hover in the twilight zone between abstraction and representation. In palette and touch, he often recalls Alex Katz, while in his earnest nonchalance he approaches the territory of Luc Tuymans and Merlin James. If you placed the right works by those last two artists on either side of Mr. Bordo’s “daybreak” (2004), the lineup would look like one painter, despite the individuality and quality of each artist.

Mr. Bordo’s new body of work, on display at Alexander & Bonin, shows the painter at his most lyrical and personal. Gone, for the most part, is his primly conceptual conceit of quilting together overlapping little landscape views within the same canvas. Instead, there are flat, allover color fields punctuated with closely paired vibrating dots, as in “Open Studio” (2003), and there are fast-looking, wet, gestural drags of looping brushstroke, as in “Head Wind” (2005).

The enigma of these quirky, almost hermetic paintings derives from the way they are highly personal – poetic to the point of seeming almost fey – yet at the same time austerely intellectual, ever probing the linguistics of paint.

Rosenquist until November 11 (18 E. 79th Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues, 212-734-6300).

Bordo until October 22 (132 Tenth Avenue between 18th and 19th Streets, 212-367-7474). Prices: $6,000-$15,000.