Tides and tidings: long known for large-scale wall drawings in which raucous crowds enact allegorical tales, Nicole Eisenman recently turned her muralist bent to canvas, devising a two-part epic in which art and lesbian motherhood are cast onto a remote yet populous island

Sight gags abound in the diptych: a woman playing a game of Sorry with death; a flag of landlocked Switzerland on the castaway's boat; "How's my painting?," a real bumper sticker Eisenman produced last year, adhered to a pretty portrait of a pretty girl. Other quips are more urbane, like the Cafe Bustelo cans filled with paintbrushes, a reference to Jasper Johns's Savarins, or a Gauguinesque native cuddling a puppy. As ever, Eisenman's satire is also serf-directed: a little figure at an easel in the cabin, for example, has a magnified eye, alluding at once to Picasso's distorted visages and Eisenman's own earlier self-portraits, in which she ruthlessly depicted her then real-life bulging eye, transforming it into a metaphor for artistic vision.

Eisenman's careening humor, by turns lacerating and playful, sets her historically-minded work apart from, say, that of John Currin, whose figurative paintings feel uptight by comparison, or German painters like Neo Rauch and other artists of the Leipzig school, whose allegories are more obscure, and perhaps more refined. Another distinction lies in her pace. No matter how carefully executed her paintings are--and they have become increasingly so over the years--or how long it takes to notice their many details, it always seems as if a surfeit of ideas propels them along at breakneck speed. Irony is essential--as it is to Currin and the Germans. Eisenman, for one, uses its distancing effects to calibrate her feverish stream-of-conscious outpourings.

The creator of drawings in multifarious profusion, Eisenman was first and is still best known for these, and she culls from them many of her characters and gags. Seeing her exhibitions over the years, including large tacked-and-taped installations of works on paper in all mediums and all degree of finish, from scraps torn out of notebooks to polished drawings in the manner of Renaissance presentation pieces, one begins to recognize the players, if not precisely to recall their various incarnations. Add to that the fact that many of them are appropriated--advertising logos, comic-book heroes, TV-commercial and B-movie characters, etc.--and one is immersed in a cosmology of vaguely familiar, low-level luminaries that ineluctably cycle through. Eisenman has a knack for endowing these often ridiculous beings with the capacity to actually arouse emotions, sometimes conflicting, in a viewer.

In one 2004 painting, for example, a figure based on The Thing (one of Marvel Comics's Fantastic Four), but made of rocks, is cast as a personification of Obscurity, mournfully reading a letter of rejection. Eisenman chose rocks as his body parts, she says, because they are old and dense; no other material would better befit his allegorical identity. One can only feel astonished that such a character elicits empathy, but he does. Embedded in this portrayal is a commentary on the vagaries of fame and the delusion of those who expect success to last. Like any good purveyor of satire, and in contrast to the anarchic side of her vision, Eisenman can be something of a moralist, in the tradition of Hogarth and Daumier. She does not suffer fools lightly, particularly if they come encumbered with a species of art-world vanity; this character was once a player, but now he is merely a loser--thus the painting's title, From Success to Obscurity.