The paintings of Yvonne Jacquette are at once immensely likable and seriously odd. In their density of color and form, they feel compellingly present, and yet they are weirdly alienating precisely thanks to the same quirky, manic qualities. Such dichotomies relate to a single contradiction at the heart of Ms. Jacquette’s enterprise: She is a realist who loves artifice.

Whether painting urban or agrarian locations, day or night, crowded or vacant, Ms. Jacquette is an empiricist. Her studio paintings are built up from pencil drawings made in situ, and photographs. Her calling is the aerial view, gained from a skyscraper or an airplane. She dips the viewer into familiar urban landmarks like Times Square or Philadelphia’s Logan Circle, but at such novel angles, and with flattened picture surfaces that admit no hierarchy and treat everything with equal attention and exactitude, that these scenes are unfamiliar. The opposite can happen, too: She will take on anonymous strip malls or efficiently farmed fields, but in discovering readymade abstractions in the arrangements of lights and the demarcations of spaces, she renders the banal exotic.

Ms. Jacquette’s relentless, feathery marks have something of the gorgeous nuttiness of van Gogh, with whom she also shares a genuine Orientalism. This comes across in the way she captures panoramic spaces without submitting to Western conventions of perspective. Instead, as in “Lower Manhattan and New Jersey, With Water Towers II” (2005), she achieves a sense of convincing volumes in deep space through geometric patterning.

Her touch – restrained but firm – has character without being emphatic or expressive. It also varies between paintings, and even across a given picture, as in “Above Times Square” (2003), where it differentiates materials: concrete, drapery, metal, brick.

Her surfaces aren’t ethereal and smooth, yet they aren’t impastoed and painterly, either. We don’t see through the medium to the scene being depicted, nor does the surface really have a life of its own. The real and the artificial are kept in permanent check and balance.

Nathan Kernan, writing in the catalog, notes the strange double life of Ms. Jacquette’s brush marks. They are true to themselves, retaining individuality rather than losing themselves in a painterly meld. Yet they often seem like things other than paint marks, whether recalling embroidery threads or linocut gougings. Ms. Jacquette loves to use her linocut-like “grooves” to depict artificial lights on wet roads, as in “Third Avenue (With Reflection) II” (2003), where car lights compete with road markings to define the streets.

Ms. Jacquette is the widow of the photographer Rudy Burckhardt, and it has often been noted that her all-encompassing yet dispassionate composed slices of reality are influenced by photography. These latest paintings, monumental in scale and scope, are reminiscent of such contemporary panoramic photographers as Andreas Gursky and Robert Polidori, whose awesome balance of detail and totality help them find a hidden order in human accumulations.

Aerial perspectives, naturally more dramatic in an airplane, as in “Napa Valley Composite II” (2005), give Ms. Jacquette unprecedented potential for what should be contradictory qualities in a composition: expansiveness and cropping. The edges, accentuated by the odd angles at which she sees the uneven, undulating ground, seem arbitrary and sudden, giving a highly contemporary sense of magnitude to her vision.

But within that macroscope, her peculiar system of notation disconcertingly draws upon the microscopic. She can achieve through touch what photographers require technological precision for: a weirdly displaced sense of intimacy that only serves to accentuate remoteness.

In fact, the way in which Ms. Jacquette builds her pictures directly mimics the actual architecture she depicts (and the same is true of her treatment of nature). In “Above Times Square,” the strokes in the ziggurat skyscraper look almost like individual masonry blocks; they join together in a hand-crafted manner that gives an undulating wobble to the structure. This explains how the paintings can seem naive despite having an incredible sense of the real that would be lacking in more photorealist precisionism.

The most recently completed painting in the show, “Walmart and Other ‘Big Box’ Stores, Augusta ME II” (2006), is at once the most real and the most artificial. In that respect, it is true to the sprawl of the suburban shopping outlets it depicts. One might guess that as a Buddhist, an artist, and a longtime summer resident of Maine, Ms. Jacquette’s heart must sink at the despoliation of her adoptive state. But true to her faith and calling, there is a nonjudgmental discovery of hidden meaning in the synthetic colors and complex abstract grids imposed on the landscape by brash neon and burgeoning parking lots.

Until April 22 (724 Fifth Avenue at 57th Street, 212-247-2111). Prices: $4,800-$50,000.