Like the 18th-century German neoclassicist Anton Raphael Mengs, who emulated Raphael, Neo Rauch was born with a prophetic moniker, or at least a name to live up to. Mr. Rauch, whose last name is German for “smoke,” has the perfect first name for an artist in whom, to paraphrase architectural theorist Charles Jencks, the wasms have become an ism. Mr. Rauch’s paintings, fusing elements of romanticism and realism from the last two centuries, resist the idea that anachronism and rejuvenation are at odds with one another.

His brightly lit, skillfully executed, enigmatically jumbled costume dramas are the subject of a condensed show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hung in an inhospitable, bunker-like mezzanine gallery, “Neo Rauch: para” is the third in an annual series devoted to young(ish) contemporary artists. The show is titled “para” after a number of words dependent on that prefix: paranormal, paranoid, paradox. Mr. Rauch’s predecessors, both Americans, were Tony Oursler and Kara Walker. The first foreigner in the series is one of the hottest stars of the international revival of traditional painterly technique. Painting with self-consciously hackneyed yet bravura panache, but in iconographically complex compositions, Mr. Rauch is a thinking person’s John Currin.

Emerging in the mid-1990s, Mr. Rauch stands at the head of what is dubbed the Leipzig School. A group of artists also including Tim Eitel, Martin Kobe, and Matthias Weischer, it is centered around that city’s renowned Academy of Graphic Arts. Isolated by the East German regime from overt influences of contemporary art, the academy offered a solid — if stolid — grounding sanctioned by social realism.

What makes Mr. Rauch into a postmodern update of Goethe’s “east-west divan” is the way he merges a realist painterly language we associate with the old Eastern bloc with a collage sensibility. Even when his figures or scraps of scenery have not been appropriated from a specific source, the inchoate jumble, the disaffection between figures, or at least their lack of organic connection, makes his paintings seem collaged. While his self-professed conservatism keeps his oddball composition shy of the subversions of full-blown Surrealism, the incongruities in which he delights bring Max Ernst’s collage novels to mind. Similarly, though Mr. Rauch’s scenes are too overtly historical to share Pop Art’s critique or celebration of contemporaneous mass culture, his lush collisions of objects and scenarios sometimes recall James Rosenquist.

Mr. Rauch’s work reflects the two political extremes of 20th-century realism: the libertarian, individualist, and unconscious in Surrealism and the authoritarian, collective, and conformist in social realism. Mr. Rauch’s imagery comes across equally as whimsical and personal, on the one hand, and concerned with history and big philosophical ideas on the other. “The Next Move” (all 2007) is a triple pun in German, as “Der nächste Zug” can also refer to a train or a drag of a cigarette. The painting shows two young men in the antiquated white jackets with blue lapels of a college fraternity, smoking and playing cards. To the left, a canopied table, with “PARA” inscribed on it, supports a painter’s palette, an open book, and other creative accoutrements. Figures lounging on a bed in the background could be an artist and his model taking an amorous break from painting and posing.

Mr. Rauch frequently includes a figure of an artist or an intellectual lost in reverie as strange events unfold around him, making these works at one level allegories of painting and its historical dilemmas. In “The Fugue,” a painting approximately 10 feet high by 14 feet wide, this figure is reading, dressed in olden-days costume, but seated on a contemporary moldedplastic chair. The shed behind him, with its graffiti, is also of our own time. Above him, dancing in the sky as if caught in the Rapture, are three figures, including women in a purple and a red dress that almost fuse, Siamese-twin style, bound or separated by a flash of light. In the center of the composition, firemen, also in vintage attire, struggle with unwieldy hoses. There is no obvious fire for them to tend, but instead a bemused giant with defiant, burly features emerges, with a chain in one arm, from a split rock. On the horizon sits a dormant volcano.

Within his short career, Mr. Rauch has already undergone one significant shift. His work of the 1990s borrowed from mid-20th-century graphic illustration and gained both nostalgia and the frisson of dubious political provenance from this printed propaganda. His palette tended towards the pastel while his brushstrokes had the neat, dry simplicity of graphic reproduction.

Recently, however, Mr. Rauch has gone more painterly and more art-historically referential. There are nods to Romantic forebears like Georg Friedrich Kersting in some of the more charming, smaller compositions. The more disturbing touchstones, stylistically, are National Socialist and East German realists. Mr. Rauch’s affinity with such sources is mitigated by his forceful sense of irony and enigma. But in his often cryptic interviews and statements, there is a troublesome way, probably reflecting an intellectual pendulum swing from the strictures of the old German Democratic Republic, that Mr. Rauch quotes liberally from writers such as Gottfried Benn and Ernst Jünger who accommodated themselves to the Third Reich.

As befits a man named Neo, these paintings are fresh, vigorous, intriguing, and fun, at least on initial impact. But the more generalized old masterliness of these new works can come over as meretricious, loosing the purposefulness of his earlier quotes of graphic sources. Also, it is the fate of the willfully anachronistic that, while trying to look older, they recall something more recent. In Mr. Rauch’s case, that would be the last go-round with art historical retrofitting, the revivals of the 1980s. In particular, his portentous period-piece jumbles are a dead ringer for the work of Scottish neo-expressionist Steven Campbell.

Still, these paintings at the Met are such rich, heady brews you really want to believe that their mystery is not mere mystification. Images like “Suburb,” with its flag burners amid an ominously placed red missile in a calmly drab Central European suburban street, and “The Flame,” with a man strapped to planks and marching in a way that forms a St. Andrew’s cross, with a chemical-industrial flame on the skyline, have the viewer rooting for meaning. With all these flames of inspiration, you can only ask, can there be Rauch without fire?

Until October 14 (1000 Madison Ave. at 82nd Street, 212-879-5500).