Everything old-fashioned is new again

George Nick is in many ways a throwback. The painter just turned 80; he came of age at the height of Abstract Expressionism, but had no interest in it. Instead, he took his canvases outside and painted what he saw. He's still doing that. His show at Gallery NAGA touches on several of Nick's chosen themes: Back Bay facades, tractors and airplanes, sun-raked interiors. (It complements "George Nick: Spirit of Place," a Danforth Museum show of his European paintings, up through May 20.)

Each time I encounter Nick's works, I approach them with suspicion because they're so seemingly old-fashioned. And each time, he surprises me with his skill, exuberance, and freshness. Nick is a painter's painter. He uses what he sees to explore questions of composition and technique. He has a deft touch and a way with shimmer that recalls works by John Singer Sargent, although he doesn't have Sargent's talent for painting people.

Look at "Grumman TBM Avenger, 21 Oct. 2006." Nick is an aficionado of antique planes and automobiles. To me, glorifying such things in paint is a bore, an easy sell to a particular viewer. That's not what Nick does, though. His airplane and hangar are more backdrops for dancing light. Glints and shadows wash fluidly across the floor, as if it were melting ice on a sunny day. The caged cockpit, the steel of wing and fuselage wink with buttery reflections from the hangar's high windows.

The artist often tilts his paintings' perspectives to the point of dizziness. "The Red Socks Won the World Series, 2004" has us peering up past the tops of Back Bay buildings, with their shifting planes and copper-green accents, right up into the blue heavens, as if giddy with thanks and praise. "Spring in Pointed Room. Tribute to Matisse, 30 March 2006" sets us looking oddly downward, toward the bottom of a mirrored door, at the bold forms carved by light and long, iridescent shadows on the floor. A foreshortened statue of a horse gazes up at us like the scene's gatekeeper, offering to let us in.

Nick may be painting the expected, but he continues to do it in unexpected ways.

Daphne Confar is as much storyteller as portraitist. Her paintings at Pepper Gallery continue in the vein she's been working in for several years. Painted on woodblock, with each side covered in gold leaf, they jut out of the wall boxy and shining, like Christmas presents.

Her imagined subjects often hold themselves with awkward pride, and her titles reveal something of their inner lives. "Jasper is usually cheerful but that waitress ruined his entire evening" gives us a tense man in a suit, his eyebrows raise d , his eyes sad and wary. Confar frames him awkwardly, too, cutting off the top of his head so that he looks as if he's in a poorly framed snapshot.

The paintings brim with affection and endearing humor, as if the artist is capturing that part of each one of us that tries just a little too hard, or that is sincere but a little misguided. She paints sparingly, summing up facial expressions and postures with just a few lines and warm tones.

While the works are as charming as their subjects, I have to wonder if Confar has reached a plateau. She's got a talent for revealing humanity in all its quirkiness, but the quirky factor may be keeping her from going deeper. Or perhaps it's not the humor that is getting in the way, but the same concept used again and again -- she's now asking viewers to suggest titles for new paintings. The images are moving, slowly, from the realm of fine art toward that of New Yorker cartoon. For all the sweetness of these portraits, maybe it's time to go in a different direction.

"An Orchid in the Land of Technology" is a fun, if spotty, little group show of work that is self-consciously technological.

Curator Joseph R. Wolin has assembled computer-generated and handmade work at OH+T Gallery. Dan Torop makes both types of art. He's added cardboard cut-outs of animals to nature scenes ("Two Chickens by the Sea" ) and photographed them, thwarting our sense of what is real. He also offers an interactive computer piece in which the viewer can alter a scene of raindrops on water to the point where it appears like Armageddon.

In his "Edge of the World" series, Oliver Warden goes deep behind the scenes of video games to find glitches in the programs, then captures their images to present digital prints of eerie, fractured landscapes -- virtual no - man's lands. Co-opting a traditional format to make a feminist point, Benjamin Sloat offers lurid, digitally altered giclee prints of women on scrolls, which we associate with the presentation of Asian landscape drawings and calligraphy.

There's more. All the works, even glowing abstract paintings by Marc Handelman , refer to a world in which technology governs the imagination, rather than the other way around. Artists like these almost seem as if they're scrambling to keep up.