TRUE VIEWS.(Rackstraw Downes)

Rackstraw Downes, the veteran painter of landscapes and urban places, is a realist esteemed by people, including me, who normally have scant use for realism in art. His current show, of work from 1999 to 2004, at the new Betty Cuningham Gallery, is powerful in quiet, stubborn ways. The subjects include a viaduct in Harlem, a flood-monitoring station on the Rio Grande, a Texas desert, electrical substations in that desert, and metal ductwork in a large, dark attic. The look of the pictures, most of them panoramas, is luminous but taciturn: just the facts. Their surfaces are fine crusts of dry, oil-starved pigment, applied in sober little strokes and patches. The tonality is so uniform that the color, though extremely varied, turns almost monochrome in memory. "I want to paint exactly the way something is," Downes said to me recently. "If that means dulling down the green, then dull it down. Find the beauty in that." The pressure of scrutiny in his pictures yields a revelation not only of how the world looks but of how the eye--unaided by photography, which Downes pointedly never uses--toils to behold it.

Downes is commonly associated with a tradition of sophisticated representational painting in New York--ranging from Alex Katz's tableaux of cool urbanites to Jane Freilicher's rumpled communions with buildings and flowers--that emerged in the nineteen-fifties, partly in opposition to Clement Greenberg's pronouncement that only abstraction could count in new art. Its progenitors included the painter and critic Fairfield Porter and the photographer and painter Rudy Burckhardt. Downes (who edited an invaluable book of Porter's writings, "Art in Its Own Terms," in 1979) came to the coterie as an apostate abstractionist in the late sixties. He stands out in it for his radical invigoration of the most slippery of aesthetic terms: realism.

Philosophically, "realism" is the doctrine that things exist independent of our perceptions of them. In art, it names any effort to square perception with what is perceived--a project long ceded, in modern times, to photography. There is an existentialist, not to say quixotic, flavor to Downes's insistence on realizing the real by hand. Such is the case with his five-canvas study of the Rio Grande flood-monitoring station, an accumulation of views of an antennaed metal shack above a tire-tracked floodplain, red aerial markers on an overhead cable that stretches to a distant bluff, prickly brush, sun-soaked concrete, umber shadows, and burning blue sky. The result is a sense of place overwhelming in its very banality. Downes likes jam-ups of culture and nature, where practical human uses overlap with indifferent geology and shaggy flora--he is the bard of weeds.

Downes is English-born but anti-theatrical in ways that recall no classic English painter except the ...