Get Real

Schaefer also includes three paintings that are very different from the others and even more neo-pop and more photographic. "Paint the town red," "One over the eight," and "In his cups" are close-ups of twisted bottle caps that are difficult to see at first because they disappear into the complicated and bold backgrounds. These paintings could indicate a future direction for Schaefer.

While Brangoccio, Swab and Schaefer are all doing paintings that could be shoehorned into the conceptual-realist rubric, the artist featured in the second show at Plus, Wes Magyar: Convergence, fits in most comfortably. His paintings are not pointedly beautiful, nor are they classically composed. They contain ambiguous and somewhat contradictory messages and seem to be about the conditions of life, both in terms of isolation as well as connectedness. In two paintings, collectively titled "Restless" and presented as a matching pair, a male-and-female couple is shown in bed from the shoulders up. Despite the fact that the two are lying together in both pictures, their facial expressions and poses suggest an air of alienation, with each facing the world alone.

Magyar is a prominent young local realist who's part of a school of similarly minded artists. He came to early fame and had work included in the permanent collection of the Denver Art Museum while he was still in his twenties. He has a simple, straightforward illustration style in which the details of a picture are turned into fairly broad strokes of color. He uses the poses of his figures to convey the psychological content with which he infuses his work. In "Convergence," for example, three men are listlessly walking on an unnervingly barren and creepy street.

Michael Brangoccio and Laurel Swab at Havu and Robin Schaefer and Wes Magyar at Plus come together as an ad hoc seminar in new realist painting. And that makes these shows worthwhile as a kind of snapshot of what's currently going on.