Marlborough Chelsea’s second-floor premises in the new Chelsea Arts Tower, a gallery condominium building on West 25th Street, is an elegant space that cries out for subtle installations. That Hunt Slonem’s solo exhibition there packs in 20 canvases of glaringly contrastive colors and sizes hung virtually cheek by jowl seems a strategy for generating a deliberately jarring aesthetic experience. If half these pictures had been left out of the show, it would have been exponentially easier on the eye. The decision to go the sardine can route, therefore, must have an intended meaning.

One could be Hitchcockian. Mr. Slonem’s favorite motif here is ornithological, as the title of his exhibition — “The Feather Game” — implies. The typical canvas masses ranks of birds such as doves and cockatoos, sometimes in checkerboard formations, other times in more scattered, but still encompassing, configurations, often in the company of flowers or butterflies. The effect of filling so much of the gallery space with these feathered friends is to recall the menacing crowd of “The Birds” (1963).

Another is to create an illusion of fresco painting, to go beyond easel painting to imply a sacred kind of space with primitive decorations. There is indeed something archaic and primal about the obsessive recurrence of motif in Mr. Slonem’s images. At the same time, there are strong references to recent art historical practice: Andy Warhol’s stenciled, repeated portrait figures (of, say, Marilyn Monroe) come to mind in “Recorded Monarchs” (2007), in which rows of doves are painted with systemic efficiency. The way Mr. Slonem’s birds fill a grid brings to mind Minimalism, which is ironic for an artist so about decadence and overload.

A third reason for packing in the canvases is to avoid precisely what would have been achieved with restraint: a focus on the individual merits and surface particularity of a given image. While Mr. Slonem’s pictures are busy with rich chroma, a distinctive texture (he impresses some kind of mesh or scrim into his paintwork), and a personal touch, they seem deliberately not invested with much by way of effort or consideration. The proliferation of canvases seems calculated to discourage a sense of preciousness. Like their motif, these are paintings that strive for lightness of being.

Until June 21 (545 W. 25th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-463-8634).