Greenwold's confessions: in his psychologically fraught, dreamlike paintings, Mark Greenwold transforms photographic sources by way of the Northern Renaissance and Baroque

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Mark Greenwold's diminutive, meticulously wrought paintings cast the people in his life, family and friends, in psychologically charged scenes with surreal touches. The works are at once mimetic and fantastical, accessible and cryptic. Notoriously slow-working, Greenwold recently had his first multiple-work, solo show in 10 years. Included were 14 oils on panel made over the past decade, a little more than one per year, along with four oil sketches, also on wood, and 16 dexterous drawings on paper in various combinations of pencil, gouache and watercolor.

A Moment of True Feeling (2004-05), the largest painting in the show at 21 1/2 by 32 inches, and typical of Greenwold's most recent efforts, depicts four people standing in a chamber with a bathroom at the back. One of them is the artist, who appears in nearly all his own works; the others are a man holding half a melon and a woman with very short dark hair, both in casual street clothing, and a woman wearing a bathrobe, identified elsewhere in a painting title as "Lucy." The figures, the room with its tile floor and satin curtains, and the view out the open window onto a European-style rooftop are executed in dots and dashes of color built up densely to become skin, fabric, ceramic, wood, etc., and eventually to coalesce as the teeming surface of the work. The image first registers as realistic; yet very quickly one sees compositional paradoxes and odd details that warp the naturalistic order. There are two kinds of illumination in the scene--sunlight coming from the window and, from within, a golden lamplight--which make it seem like day and night at once. The space is off kilter. The man at the center is situated both in front of and behind the dark-haired woman, and in front of and behind a table--the kind of compositional enjambment one sees in early Netherlandish painting. The figures' heads are all a little too large for their bodies, and above those heads, like halos or thought bubbles, are small, colorful bursts of abstract painting in styles that resemble those of various contemporary artists. Above Lucy, for example, are colored lozenges like those in works by Greenwold's old friend Chuck Close--but wait, there is Close himself, or his head at least, grinning maniacally on the body of a giant grasshopper at Greenwold's feet.

For that matter, the expression on Greenwold's face is similar to the one he wears in Close's well-known painting Mark (1978-79) and related drawings with Greenwold as subject, though in his serf-representation he has aged by 30 years and wears a beard, as he has for many years. "Personally, I've always hated that image," Greenwold once said about Mark in an interview with Close, "not as a painting, but as a way of being remembered." Maybe that's why the grasshopper Close has been pierced through the skull by a weapon (vanquished by Greenwold?) and has worms emanating from another skull hole and from the comers of his mouth. The grasshopper, like many such hybrid, Kafkaesque creatures in Greenwold's universe, is a visual digression both repulsive and funny. It sheds no light on why these people are here in this room together--nor what the nature of their relationship is. Each seems frozen in his or her respective consciousness, the man at the center looking off to the side and the other three figures out toward the viewer, as if presenting themselves for consideration.

The Need to Understand (2002-03), in which the artist hovers in midair wearing a dress identical to that of a woman in the foreground, was the first painting in which the little abstractions appeared over people's heads, a device that he has used ever since. They make it seem as though everyone is thinking and talking about art. Although Greenwold was born in Cleveland (1942), went to school in the Midwest and has lived for many years in Albany, N.Y., the New York art scene is very much a presence in these paintings. Close is only one of a number of recognizable art-world figures in them (the couple in A Moment of True Feeling are the artists James Siena and Katia Santibanez)--and by including these people and basing their depiction on photographs, Greenwold may be seen to have an affinity with Close that is artistic as well as personal.

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Press materials reveal that Greenwold borrows his settings (almost all of them interiors) from architecture and shelter magazines--so these people were never in the depicted place, except through the agency of his imagination. Such images are one kind of photography that he relies upon, and it makes the characters feel like actors on a stage. Engaged in sometimes troubling interactions, they are also, in a way, trespassing. Moreover, their source in personal photos--remnants of which can be detected in their friendly and casual poses, gestures and expressions--seems at odds with the elaborate, sometimes overwrought scenarios set up by the artist, not to mention with his exacting, old-masterly style. In A Moment of True Feeling, the couple's postures and props--his melon, the position of her watch--convey the informality of a snapshot; but the folding together of different kinds of spaces--the imbrication of the couple and the convincing optical recession elsewhere--is more the work of a painting. This formula sets Greenwold apart from Magic Realists like George Tooker or later artists who fall into that tradition, like Robert Schwartz, Julie Heffernan or Hillary Harkness, in whose work photography plays little or no role.