What exactly Burgess Collins, known to the world simply as Jess, thought he was up to in his “Translations” series — those faithful appropriations of black-and-white images, mostly from the 19th century, that he transformed into thickly impastoed, full-color paintings — is difficult to say. The result, in any case, is a form of beauty as weird and memorable as any American artist has achieved in the past half-century. To appreciate these works, several of which are now on view at Tibor de Nagy, requires an act of surrender, an ability to refrain from asking why or how Jess did what he did, and what any of it could possibly mean.

Most of the works at Tibor de Nagy, however, are paper collages rather than paintings, and the argument could be made that the collage aesthetic was the dominant formal conviction of Jess’s career, a sustained act of reconfiguring the discarded flotsam and jetsam of European, and to a lesser degree American, culture. In many respects, Jess (1923-2004) was Joseph Cornell re-born in two dimensions. He mined the same rich detritus of 19th-century scientific literature and 17th-century mythological writings to create a sweet-tempered, Euro-philic re-interpretation on human civilization. But while Cornell created his works from the seclusion of Ozone Park in Queens, Jess worked out of San Francisco’s Mission District. The home that he shared with his long-standing partner, the poet Robert Duncan, would become a major cultural center in San Francisco.

No illustration of Jess’s paintings, certainly none in black and white, can ever provide a sense of what it is like to stand in front of the real thing. Photographs merely translate the translation back into something like the original, which was chosen in the first place because it was generally unprepossessing.

An early work, “Laying A Standard: Translation #1,” shows a table half-covered in shade beside a doorway. The picture is well-composed and the yellow highlights of the door and the table, against the nocturnal ground, are dramatic and lovely. But the real glory of the work is its rich painterliness, the way the viscous colors have been applied to the canvas. Unlike the uncorseted painterliness of the New York School, however, here each pocket of pigment remains, with almost superhuman reserve, within the strict bounds of its linear zone.

One could, if one chose, read a great deal of art history into Jess’s “Translations.” Like his near-contemporary Jasper Johns, as well as the other Pop artists, Jess was rebelling against the aggressive machismo of the Abstract Expressionists. Where that older generation was intent on exuberant riot, Jess, like Mr. Johns, seems quieter and far more reserved. Like Mr. Johns, as well, he does not aspire to pure painting, as the New York School was thought to do, but rather refers with brash directness to anything and everything that enters his cultural purview.

But if the recent exhibition of Mr. Johns’s gray paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art proved anything, it was that this much-sought-after master was and remains something of a bore, and that his paintings are gray to the point of banality. Matters are not improved in Mr. Johns’s case, by the self-important solemnity with which he has proceeded over the past half-century, as though the future of human culture were at stake in each of his productions.

In complete contrast to Mr. Johns, Jess is animated, as Cornell was, by a pure and childlike joy in color and form. Mr. Johns may inspire a begrudging respect in some viewers, but he never enchants, as Jess always does in his “Translations.”

Two other subsets of Jess’s career can be seen at Tibor de Nagy. Most abundant are his collages, those vertiginous summae of hundreds, if not thousands, of references and allusions crammed into a few square feet. Surely they are fun and they are often very fine. Even in a massive work such as “The Untitled Graces” (1978), it is absolutely clear that Jess is thinking in pictorial terms, as the unified formal and chromatic register makes clear. But the viewer has the uneasy sense that things might, at any moment, slip out of the artist’s control. Nor can one quite dispel the nagging sense of needing more information in order to get the point.

Then there are the straight paintings that Jess turned out at various points in his career. An example of this would be his early work “The Visitation” (1955). Even here you can see the presence of certain formal and contextual motifs that would be essential to Jess’s subsequent career, such as the use of impastation and the spiritual questing represented by the presence of an angel. Even here, in the least of his efforts, Jess never fails to impress and engage us.

Until July 31 (724 Fifth Ave. at West 56th Street, 212-262-5050).