At 76, Paul Resika’s territory is a place where few “cutting edge” artists care to tread, a place of unabashed pleasure in painting. This is apparent in his sun-splashed scenes, the limpid arabesque of his forms, and his vivid, loosely brushed colors. Mr. Resika’s motifs are limited in number – landscapes with nudes and sailboats dominate this, his eighth show at Salander-O’Reilly Galleries – but they provide limitless opportunities for manipulating pigment and shapes.

A certain serenity of technique prevails – indeed, the chance he takes with his style is to make Modernist traditions seem just as predictable as they are pleasurable. But Mr. Resika, a formidable colorist, uses the intangible qualities of hue and intensity to construct tangible presences. More recently the artist’s simplified forms have become even more starkly abstracted, the colors less naturalistic, their tonal range narrowed, as if he were eager to differentiate forms with hue alone.

Over the years, his most striking works have been elemental displays of atmosphere and space: vibrant images of piers silhouetted by sunsets, and boat hulls shifting within luminous watery planes. The drawing in these images was reductive and emphatic, serving principally as a conduit for lively color. In the current show, Mr. Resika’s paintings continue to convince us with their specificity of light and gesture: “Ariadne II” (2005), among the most abstract of the 14 large paintings at Salander, animates its entire expanse of canvas with a handful of adroit notes of color.

A humming plane of scumbled bluegreens supports both a distant sailboat and a female nude reclining languorously in the foreground. A lone tree trunk (or pole, perhaps) climbs the left margin of the canvas, bridging the two worlds. Subtle gradations of color – a glowing pink-orange for the figure, a buttery shock of white for the sail, coolly brushed magentas in the trunk – give weight to their locations, and so, too, the vastness of space in between. Moving from horizon to figure to the foliage encroaching above, the viewer has the sensation of intense physical displacement. The conceit is familiar – the intimation of immense distances with minimal means – but Mr. Resika makes it compelling.

“Aphrodite II” (2003) elasticizes space on a far more intimate scale. This composition is dominated by a central female figure whose uplifted arms, crossed over her head, forcefully hold a point in space above our eye level. A slight asymmetry in the contours of the torso conveys a shifted stance, which disappears into swirls of fish swimming in depths far below our point of view. Again, distances are charged, expanses truly expansive. Is the entire scene underwater? Apparently, but the artist doesn’t offer illustrative cues like bubbles or streaming hair; he’s bent on characterizing presences, not explaining scenarios.

The luscious paint-swirls in “Hibiscus-roses” (2003) remind us that Mr. Resika is a master of the luminous scumble. Elsewhere in the exhibition, however, the artist’s attack tends to be leaner. In some canvases, the first broad stabs at drawing remain visible beneath later reworkings; a line of mountains, barely apparent at the horizon of “Composition” (2004), is enough to convey a whole dimension of depth.

Certain strategies reoccur: the jutting prow of a boat that holds down the corner of a composition, the single, abrupt sail measuring out the undulations of distant hills. Occasional rhymings become automatic and obvious, as in the mechanically echoed white triangles of “Noon” (2004).

Mr. Resika’s keen colors, however, impart an original vigor to “Sunday” (2004), one of the show’s highlights. Here, the parallel reclinings of female figure and rowboats under a leafy tree harken back to Courbet’s “Les Demoi selles des Bords de la Seine” (1856-57), but Mr. Resika’s bold sweeps of color make this scene entirely his own. Each element finds its own indispensable character.

A flesh-colored tree limb winds steadily, thickly, down from above. The lithe wedge of the female form, a subdued orange hum, echoes the angled descent; a rowboat prow, an arc of full-blooded cadmium orange, interjects in the tense gap between the two. Above, clouds, leaves, and hills release in loose billows of color. In a few moments, your eye picks up secondary rhythms: the pale, focusing note of a hat, the small, deliberate discursions of crooking branches. The impression is of a complete journey, a scene recreated in both its expansiveness and its details, richly unfolding before one’s attention.

Style isn’t everything in art, and its importance tends to diminish the longer one spends with a particular work. But Mr. Resika’s canvases, like those of his teacher Hans Hofmann and the masters Hofmann admired, contain in rhythms of colors a deeper description of events. This description is improvisational, intuitive, formula-defying – that is, unpredictable – and forms the rigorous purpose underneath Mr. Resika’s seductive technique.

Until March 26 (20 E. 79th Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues, 212-879-6606). Prices: The gallery declined to disclose its prices.