Are artists contemporary if they work in a tradition that doesn’t trace its lineage to Marcel Duchamp? There are, after all, living, breathing people making art that doesn’t engage in cynical commentary. Does their work fall under some other rubric?

Distinctions, often painfully contrived, will be sorted out by history. In the meantime, attention should be paid to contemporaries who provide pleasure without apology or extra-aesthetic justification. The abstract paintings of Julie Evans, the subject of an exhibition at Julie Saul Gallery, do just that. They are—you got it—ravishing, sumptuous and beautiful.

Ms. Evans is inspired by sources from before the advent of modernism and, more importantly, from beyond Western culture. Radiant in color and crystalline in contour, her acrylic and gouache paintings point, clearly if not exclusively, to Indian art. She’s no dilettante: Under the auspices of the Fulbright Program, Ms. Evans traveled to Sanskriti Kendra, an artist’s retreat in New Delhi, to study the painting of miniatures.

Given the trajectory of Ms. Evans’ art over the past 10 years or so, her studies paid off. The paintings—once populated by unappealingly fleshy blobs suspended aimlessly within atmospheric runs of color—have gained in focus, purpose and execution. Their newfound clarity can be traced, in part, to an increasingly intimate and, yes, miniaturist size. Ms. Evans’ recent efforts are hardly bigger than a sheet of paper. The largest panel is 18 by 18 inches; in this context, it’s positively Pollockian.

The internal scale of the paintings, in contrast, is immeasurable. The bantam formats and involved compositions are expansive and airy. Indian miniatures encapsulate impossibly detailed narratives, landscapes and architecture. Ms. Evans gave careful consideration to their spectacular precision; it’s there to see in her pictures. Her decorative motifs—most consistently the circle, with recognizable botanical motifs here and there—float, ascend and drift in spaces that make the nighttime sky seem as shallow as a desk drawer.

Though it draws on a limited array of regulated shapes, Ms. Evans’ vocabulary of form feels remarkably various. Overlapping mandalas are augmented with meticulously dotted patterns. Concentric circles radiate toward the viewer like fireworks stilled at the moment of explosion. Arabesques unfurl from out of nowhere. Stylized flowers arise and blossom. A thin frame of color runs around the perimeter of each panel without constraining the images.

Unobtrusive humor informs Ms. Evans’ quasi-psychedelic vision. Circles merge into cartoonishly bulbous shapes like speech bubbles devoid of words. Even better are the diagrammatic loops punctuating the paintings—they’re drawn with a Spirograph. Damien Hirst employs spin paintings as a cheap Dadaist joke; Ms. Evans uses a vintage toy and conjures the cosmos.

Ms. Evans’ rhythms are slow and calm, gentle and stoic. She achieves intensity through craft and color. The paintings evolve from scraped and slurred runs of paint, traces of which are intermittently revealed. The move from rough-and-tumble beginnings to an exacting resolution results in some tension, but ultimately there’s little disconnect between the extremes. Ms. Evans brings these pictures exquisitely to fruition.

A gauge of a painting’s success is that it can be “read” from up close and at a distance. In this respect, color is Ms. Evans’ strong point. Entering the gallery, viewers will immediately be wowed by her exotic palette: It’s as if you’ve never seen color before. Brilliant, almost neon pinkish-purples and burnished oranges predominate; slate grays, creamy yellows and deep greens bring things a little more down to earth without sacrificing sensuality. Ms. Evans’ hothouse colors are almost decadent in their opulence; they reveal a ridiculously able colorist.

Writing in the catalog, the critic Michael Duncan describes the pictures as “machines of the spirit whose garlanded gears can swallow time.” Ms. Evans taps into the artistic conventions of Eastern cultures with an admirable lack of self-consciousness, but satori isn’t necessarily her thing. Her work may touch on the mystical as a reference, but her true strength lies in her luminous style. It doesn’t diminish her accomplishments to say as much. Ms. Evans painstakingly reclaims the decorative. It’s enough that the paintings are wonderful to look at.

Would that the gallery gave us less to look at. The 19 paintings on view add up to about a dozen too many. Ms. Evans’ panels demand elbowroom in order to experience them without distraction. Placing one painting after another in fairly predictable fashion doesn’t put their intricacies into high relief.

In this way, the gallery misses the point: Ms. Evans isn’t an assembly line; she’s a painter of consummate pictorial skill. Then again, hanging any of these paintings on the wall amounts to a validation of Ms. Evans’ art. And given its verdant seductions, that’s a boon for the rest of us.

Julie Evans is at Julie Saul Gallery, 535 West 22nd Street, until May 5.

Space in Ms. Evans’ paintings is deep and fluid, awash with light and suffused with portent. Bobbing within it are dottings and ribbons of pattern, at times submerged by a golden haze, at other times coalescing into tangible structures. Hazy yellows, velvety greens and crystalline alizarins distinguish the palette, making the surfaces surprisingly rich. We don’t tend to think of gouache, an opaque watercolor, as a luxuriant medium—it’s too dry and matte, too taciturn a paint, to actively seduce the eye. Ms. Evans proves otherwise, beguiling the viewer with sumptuous textures and tones.

She hits her stride when working on panels measuring not much more than a foot in either direction. Ms. Evans’ previous efforts were larger and discursive—willful, too. A small format strengthens, as well as makes resilient, her painterly imagination. Bringing an entire cosmos to fruition within a framework that could be tucked into a handbag, Ms. Evans creates vistas infinitely more expansive than the physical parameters of the painting’s support. Clearly the conventions of Indian miniature painting have become second nature to her. No wonder the work has gained in surety, density and scope.

Julie Evans: Swish of the Yak Tail Fly-Whisk is at Metaphor Contemporary Art, 382 Atlantic Avenue (open Thursday through Sunday), until Oct. 10.

Third Dimension

Every time I write about the sculptures of Bruce Brosnan, I grumble that they’re not sculptural enough. Admitting to the third dimension is difficult for Mr. Brosnan. His kid-friendly brand of biomorphic abstraction, constructed from flat panels of wood, depends a lot on pictorial definition. Shape, color and space occur within the pieces as painted form. I’ve sometimes wondered if Mr. Brosnan is a sculptor at all.

After visiting Feature Inc., which is exhibiting the artist’s recent work, I’m convinced that Mr. Brosnan is, in fact, a sculptor—an opinion predicated on two recent drawings, puzzle-like agglomerations of organic shape. They’re dreadful: No one with a lick of pictorial know-how would want to claim student-grade pastiches of Cubism and Peter Max as their own. That Mr. Brosnan has leads me to believe, at the very least, that he’s not a painter.

Not a ringing affirmation of Mr. Brosnan’s sculptural facility, I know. If he exhibits painterly flair only when working on irregular pieces of wood, the forays into sculptural form continue to wobble. Watch Mr. Brosnan place a goofy cut-out form on top of an equally goofy wooden support—you can’t help but register his irresolution about how far it should pop out, or what it should be popping against. These good questions are fudged rather than answered. It might help if Mr. Brosnan familiarized himself with Gertrude Greene, an unheralded American modernist who made a distinctive contribution to the medium of painted wood relief. Once he gets that far, we’ll talk about overcoming a congenital case of the cutes. In the meantime, Mr. Brosnan soldiers on, amiably and to diverting effect.

Bruce Brosnan: Sculpture is at Feature Inc., 530 West 25th Street, until Oct. 9.

Goofy Tsunami

"Fuckin’ rad, man!" That’s the sentiment I overheard from an enthusiastic patron of LFL Gallery in response to Nothing’sCutie (2004),a sprawling, site-specific installation by Phoebe Washburn. The primary media of Ms. Washburn’s mixed-media extravaganzais wood—or, to be precise,innumerable lengths of wood painted NeccoWafer bright. Connected with drywall screws,they form a huge and rickety architectural tsunami; you have to walk under the thing to get inside the gallery. Propped up by a folding table, two-by-fours and some five-gallon buckets, Nothing’s Cutie is populated by a lot of pencils, a lot of pencil boxes, a lot of rolls of four-inch-wide tape and an ocean of sawdust. Imagine the New York City diorama at the Queens Museum as built by a precocious child who’s been locked inside the woodshed long enough to go a little batty. What makes this floor-to-ceiling tribute joyous excess work is its naturalism: Nothing’s Cutie ebbs and flows with a compelling, unforced ease. The aforementioned gallery-goer was off in his critical assessment: Ms. Washburn’s achievement isn’t radical, it’s ridiculous—that’s why it’s good.

Phoebe Washburn is at the LFL Gallery, 530 West 24th Street, until Oct. 2.

Letscher's Stunning Chelsea Debut

As if to prove that the most exciting contemporary art is made by the least usual of suspects, here comes Lance Letscher from Austin, Tex. Mr. Letscher, who is having his first solo New York exhibition at the Howard Scott Gallery, is unusual not just in terms of his geography, but also in his aesthetic. Uninterested in fashion, resistant to pomp and constitutionally incapable of the rote or superficial, he's something we don't encounter too often: an artist of substance, grit and purpose.

Mr. Letscher makes abstract collages from found objects, yet is particular enough about the objects he finds that that classification is all but beside the point. Favoring materials that have the patina of history and handling, Mr. Letscher shapes his art with old ledgers, discarded diaries, antiquarian books and recipes for Grandma's Old Fashioned Molasses Nut Squares. While enamored of these items, the artist exhibits no compunction in slicing and dicing them for the greater good-that good being an art permeated with memory, encompassing in outlook and indebted to the land. His pieces bring to mind the notations of an amateur astronomer or the shimmer of the setting sun.

Mr. Letscher stops us in our tracks; once there, we don't want to leave. As an artist, he's as nuanced as Anne Ryan, as delicate as Joseph Cornell and as pure-in his own impure way-as Sol Lewitt. But the artist Mr. Letscher resembles most is William Blake: He, too, strives for unquenchable metaphysical sustenance. In the end, however, I prefer Mr. Letscher. His pictures are a lot more pliable than Blake's-a lot less loony, too. In fact, the sober tone of Mr. Letscher's reveries may be an indicator of the lonely fate a visionary suffers in an age as tech-happy as our own. Then again, it could just mean that he's a laconic type from Texas. Whatever the case, this is one stunning debut. Lance Letscher: Someone's Life/Collages and Drawings is at Howard Scott Gallery, 529 West 20th Street, seventh floor, until April 27.

Mr. Schnabel,

Meet Mr. Gagosian

An 800-pound gorilla may get our attention, but does that mean it deserves it? Julian Schnabel, who has seven new paintings and one new sculpture on display at the Chelsea branch of Gagosian Gallery, is still doing what he does best-that is, being Julian Schnabel. His recent series of pictures are typical in that they devote a preponderance of bluster to the scrawniest of conceits. Collectively titled Big Girl Paintings , they're based on a portrait of a woman the artist found in a thrift shop and subsequently defaced. I mention this only as a matter of journalistic duty-I mean, does anyone care what Mr. Schnabel paints? Mr. Schnabel certainly doesn't; his epic self-regard has long since absolved him from such niceties as color, composition and questioning why these paintings are so goddamned big.

The art historian Robert Rosenblum, writing in the accompanying catalog, begs to differ and compares the pictures to a work by Joan Miró. But the rest of us know better. People don't go to a Schnabel show for art; they go for the spectacle. That the current spectacle pairs Mr. Schnabel with Mr. Gagosian, the emperor of the contemporary scene, makes for a perversely compelling logic. Between the two of them, they add up to almost a ton of gorilla. Julian Schnabel: Big Girl Paintings is at Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th Street, until April 20.

Pouring and Dripping

Her Way Into Our Favor

I almost really like the paintings of Julie Evans, currently the subject of an exhibition at Cheryl Pelavin Fine Art. Ms. Evans' abstractions depict a billowing realm populated by painterly incident and ornamental flourish. Arriving at her images through a process of pouring and dripping, stippling and staining, Ms. Evans' art hints at the obsessive and embraces the exotic. With its honeyed palette and gentle, rocking rhythms, the work proposes a cushiony state of grace. To Ms. Evans' credit, it pretty much gets there: Her layered surfaces have the well-worn tactility of a favorite blanket.

Still, the aim of art-and, for that matter, satori-is to flow like a river, not fuss like a painter. When putting brush to canvas as a means of approximating the chance events that served as a springboard, the artist desires ease but betrays strain; the work can be forced. Yet when Ms. Evans punctuates her pictures with cookie-cutter mandalas of red, pink and yellow, she eschews ease only to achieve it. Then there are the occasions when everything pulls together-in the fleshy yellow sweep of Bo (2002), the satiny generosity of Festoon #3 (2001) and the mute presence that stares out at us from an untitled canvas dating from this year. Did I say I almost really like Ms. Evans' paintings? Some of them I like quite a bit. Julie Evans: Festoon is at Cheryl Pelavin Fine Art, 13 Jay Street, until April 27.