Picture, if you will, a pensive Captain Nemo, absently stroking his Rasputin beard as he peers out from the Nautilus' panoptical eye onto the coral gardens, Sargasso jungles and kelp forests of the big blue. Stuffed from a feast of anemone jam, cetacea milk and dolphin's liver faintly redolent of pork ragout, the good captain tilts his Orientalist turban, straightens his silk robes and surveys with giddy wonder the petrified vista of barnacled shipwrecks and sponge-like grottoes unfolding with metronomic calm before him.

Giant underwater ferns languorously wave back at him, caught up in a mild jet stream. Miniature submerged Krakatoas - pocked and dimpled bases garnished with frozen lava - mock the Cartesian mania of the surface world he's just renounced. Emerald batfish fins wink back at him as they dart through a Roman coliseum's sunken arches. For Nemo, then, the artificial ruins of this liquid habitat are a submarine Crystal Palace, an intact city encased in a glass dome seemingly designed for his own private delectation. It is a postcard Atlantis purged of traumatic event-no tidal wave, earthquake, or volcanic explosion-just a static and idealized blueprint of an irretrievable event, recovered in a state of perfect abundance and idleness. He simply condenses the motifs of real ruins-catastrophe, vanishment, irreparable structural damage-sets them outside the context of historical time, and turns the sedimentary layers of fossilized starfish and pulverized crustaceans into a "style of loss."

The time is 1866, so it's no surprise that Nemo's descent into morbid connoisseurship is an unconscious circling of the wagons around the twin specters of looming industrial revolution on one hand, and his own slow dawning that the terrestrial world can not and will not submit to his managerial protocols, his demiurgic grandstanding. Machine Age odes to convenience and chest-thumping anthems glorifying speed, likely strike Nemo as a kind of propagandistic white noise, the original New Economy marketing lingo lubing the rusty gears of sleeping assembly lines for the endless product roll-outs to come, the corkscrewing consumption loops.

Ever the cynical aesthete, Nemo smartly intuits that the brand being built, albeit in tadpole form, is designed to leave one hungry for more. This seedling Capitalism, though increasingly pinpoint marketed to an array of growing niches, will never be too specific, never quite satisfy one's acquisitive instinct, never emotionally connect with its intended end-user in, say, the manner of a sentimental heirloom (insert: Baccarat "blizzard weight"), and so he descends 20,000 leagues under the sea to protect his need for silent reverie. In turning away from belching smokestacks and grinding locomotives, Nemo turns back the clock (or at least pauses it), adopting a bunker mentality where the slings and arrows of contingent fortune whiz by overhead, as he lovingly admires in the murky depths what must appear to the casual observer as an extraterrestrial petting zoo, a deranged hobbyist's tabletop galaxy run amok. While the Eminent Victorians above him tug on their ruffled collars in gilded parlors accented with antlered hat stands and ostrich leg doorstops -embalming nature in order to exert hierarchical supremacy over it - Nemo, the world's first underwater flaneur, is busy cobbling together (at a luxurious two knots) a customized niche of his own. Call it the "demographic of one," where the urge to comfortably nest joins up with the instinct for monomaniacal taxonomy.

Fast forward to the calamitous 21st Century, where the soft-focus oil paintings of Frank Brunner seem like -to my browbeaten eyes at least- a welcome reprieve from the data-smog of the city, a much needed vacation from the stifling cloud of random information absent any pattern recognition. Dire techno-futurists call this mobius swirl of blankness, the "Coming Singularity," a perfect rationalist fusion of nano-tech, mapped genomes, cloned stem cells, AI, robotics, and virtual transubstantiation that squelches sacred ritual in favor of an engineered pseudo-pathos. If jostling parasols and whinnying horses were sufficient to drive Nemo underground, imagine his full blown alarm upon logging into the public chat room of the average urban boulevard circa 2005: bleating ring tones, whirring sirens, screeching car horns and lumbering trucks. Nemo, if memory serves, fled impending anxiety; Frank Brunner, to his credit, paints perfectly composed figural tableau amid a full blown riot of anxiety breaking out in the immediate present. As a painter of modern life, then, Brunner not only demonstrates grace under pressure in his brush's finely tuned, pixilated smears, but serves up average citizens in moments of disarming serenity that are emblematic of the notion of grace under pressure in and of themselves.

There is, make no mistake, a long and storied history of art about art, and a short but growing canon of art about the viewing of art. Thomas Struth's panoramic photos portraying art enthusiasts of all ages striking voguish poses of attentive high-seriousness, instantly spring to mind. And it should come as no surprise that both Struth and Brunner adopt deadpan titling schemes - Pantheon, Rome, 1990; 45º MoMA #1, 2005, respectively - that highlight the futility of such specific place-names given their homogenous grab-bag of backpack-toting, cargo-pant wearing, shoe-gazing subjects stricken by a reverential hush in locations as culturally disparate as Berlin and Brunei. But always inside the museum, mind you, never out. Yes, you can be sure that the calendrical index is faithfully recorded for posterity (lending an extra layer of mathematical detachment to the thin air of chilly remove on view), but really, why bother, Struth and Brunner seem to be saying, when postmen and plastic surgeons, flight attendants and parking attendants, all willingly heed the quasi-mystic rafters of Big Culture for both edification and escape.

But we know that. Significantly, Brunner ups the ante on Struth's preachy dialectic of ecstatic figures in very famous paintings modifying and/or dictating behavior of instantly forgettable sad-sack spectators in front of said famous paintings, by taking the conversation outside of the museum walls altogether. Specifically, adjacent to it, in a Feng Shui zone of landscaped Zen contemplation that both prepares the intrepid spectator for impending grandiloquent plenitude and helps him decompress from same. All, it hardly bears mentioning, while breathing an exhausted sigh as one takes a much needed load off in mid-century modern furniture most likely culled from the museum's own design collection. Struth's clinical photos, though unstaged, have a cloying inevitability that reek of October magazine's periodical autopsies. By welcome contrast, Brunner's paintings - habituated safely outside of MOMA's consensual rules of conduct, stone-faced security guards, or, if I may generalize here, the whole joyless masquerade of suitably awestruck villagers let loose on a Sunday field trip to the local Kunsthalle - open up an exceedingly more fluid zone of inquiry, where "sepulchral institutional chill" and "museum as mall" are never the two straw men being mercilessly flogged.

It's precisely this breaking of the fourth wall - snapping the bedazzled viewer out of his usual fictive trance by revealing the prosaic tasks of museum maintenance - that is but one recurring leitmotif in the 45º MoMA 2005 series. As an aside, let me further add that if it were you stepping back to admire David Smith's steel t-bar sculpture, or the green and red diamonds in Ellsworth Kelley's elegant little harlequin pattern - the former, a 60s post-industrial valentine; the latter, a tidy Bauhaus masterpiece - turning on a dime past the museum's new cafe to enter the scrum of the contemporary collection, you'd glimpse small huddles of earnest conversation taking place, backs turned obliviously away from Elizabeth Peyton's diffusion smeared fan's notes, or the batik patterns in Yinka Shonibare's diasporic dandies. You would be, in other words, trapped in a Tim Eitel painting, a mournful young German who envisions any museum's nested interior angles as fishbowl prosceniums for chance encounters and transcendental epiphanies, stealth eavesdropping and furtive straightening of hair in, say, the handy reflective sheen of a nearby Thomas Demand photo.

As broad social commentary, then, Eitel's paintings (though superbly executed) bear the faint atomized whiff of consumer critique. The notion that somehow, if one squints in the appropriately soft-Marxist way, lithe twenty-something Sprockets pinned like butterflies under glass, begin to vaguely illustrate the not so earth-shattering point that, these days, just about everybody harmonically converges on their neighborhood museum like blacksmiths and haberdashers sharing a communal pint back in Nemo's own time. Eitel's not-so-subtle inference, then, is that such populist aesthetic upwelling can only mean that the keepers of the Gnostic flame are - mein gott! - relaxing their guidelines for club membership, channeling their inner Spielberg.

Pick up a lifestyle magazine and clock the breathless lip-service accorded such phrases as "Sincerity is the New Sincerity" and "Taste Makes Waste" in duly self-mocking and, I might add, patently insincere tones; a self-congratulatory editorial hustle which can't help but suggest the true cosmopolitan's hard-bitten conviction of exactly the opposite. Quite simply, that irony and taste are this week's redeeming angels, vanquishing with a bitch-slapping wing any "conten" that does not first prop up, that which it later seeks to deflate. I mention this because Eitel's mannequins in arrested motion seem islanded unto themselves - offering us their backs, eschewing direct address - but finally tipping their lugubrious hands with thousand yard stares that ape the cinematic yearning for something beyond ennobling culture which made Nemo himself a doomed anti-hero almost a full century and a half before.

This comparison seems fitting, since Brunner arranges his figures in much more candid tableaux, without the empty existential acreage - and by extension, palpable longing - that fairly coats with thick goo Edward Hopper's A Woman in the Sun, 1961. A painting, I hasten to add, of few component parts (a woman, a bed, a window), which still weirdly manages to be both achingly desolate and chokingly claustrophobic. Like Hopper, the figures in any given Brunner scene are blissful innocents wrapped up in their own humdrum thought balloons, but from there he dramatically veers away from Hopper's static wedding cake figurines, never ratcheting up the solemnity, never lazily resorting to sepia-toned rapture. In other words, gazes are not eternally locked on an unbridgeable distance, nor demurely cast inward in a "plumbing of one's emotional depths," nor, I have a hunch, are they leveled accusatorily at unwitting viewers brazen enough to stumble into their Medusa-like glare.

After all, the emotional well dredged by most successful painters today is, sadly enough, neither wide nor deep. Predictably, there is no vibrating quantum wave encompassing a dilating range of affect, just particles riding their cresting lips, whereby joy seizes one loosely in its invisible hand, and introspection - at its opposing extreme - freezes one tightly in its chilly grip. Given this arid basin of blandly sweeping denotation, a mood of baroque jubilation generally announces itself in full parade dress like some preening bird of paradise flanked by Amazonian palm fronds, while a tone of melancholy inertia limps in like a gangly standard-bearer for the Keatsian swoon, tobacco stained fingers nervously twitching at the lapels of its tattered waistcoat. One is a trumpeting squawk, the other a clenched murmur.

In this context, it's worth reciting a statement Brunner made in 2000, referring to his use of jungle motifs - coiled vines, skeletal ferns, drooping foliage - as an impenetrable scrim through which we gain an intensity of experience, only by struggling to insinuate ourselves around, beneath, through, and ultimately beyond its prohibitive veil, which rests tattoo-like on the canvas's deceptively planar surface. In short, take a flat surface, suggest a boundless depth, drape a curtain in front of the proffered invitation (here, a rhizomatic network of tendrils), and essentially conjure some gorgeous heavy weather where the viewer can't help but be compelled to tease out the latent intensity within the storm: "In strong emotional experiences," Brunner explains, "we find nuances that rationality cannot explain. Enthusiasm and optimism are aspects of intensity, just as much as a strong sense of melancholy. In my view, the jungle contains the conflict between light and darkness."

Nuance, for purposes of our discussion, is the operative word here. And nuance, five years later, is the heliotropic plant Brunner tends without aid of lambent backlighting or spectral afterglow. The vaporous nuclear winter suffusing Luc Tuyman's entire body of work— a morbid turn of mind cum unbiased Polaroid reportage cum diagnostic X-ray bleaching life away cum punctual indictment of human folly - is meant to transport us through the "mists of history," a suitably humid climate, one imagines, where disembodied wraiths stagger by as emblems of civilization's gross mismanagement. No doubt, Tuyman's phantasmic tour de forces have few peers, but his fear of instant legibility is telling. Brunner, too, is no fan of perfect registration and he seems to share Tuyman's belief that facts must be shrouded to spark our memory's associative powers. The salient difference is that Brunner is not trading on the disembodied enigma's presumption to multivalent ambiguity; as many different shades of ambiguity as there are people to receive them. In this sense, he's much more allegorical, painting fully realized urban pastoralia - swarming Koi fish in the Brooklyn Museum's pond, students squatting on the Metropolitan's arena of steps - that become compelling in their accumulation of small details. Where Tuyman's austere program is a one of progressive structural decomposition, an emptying out of the acoustically sealed container to facilitate an atmospherics of terrifying nullity, Brunne's agenda, by stark contrast, is defiantly additive, calling to mind Paul Klee's modest dictum: "Painting is built up piece by piece, no different from a house."

In a way, you might call Brunner and Nemo kindred spirits, both replacing the inadequate known world with the hothouse intensity of their own. But the logical end-game to Nemo's pathological hoarding complex, manifests itself as a daily dose of treasures secreted away in his drifting Wunderkammer, temporarily relieving his necrophiliac ennui like time-release tranquilizers. This iron-clad Ark of personally shopped new species is, in the final accounting, merely a floating bachelor pad that retains a pagan spirit of play (if only for an adoring audience of one), while the locus of capital busies itself erasing mystic potential in ever more specialized task-based subroutines. Formulated this way, Brunner is the generous host of an ample feast whose signature delicacy is, in the case of the 45º MoMA series, a revealing look behind the museum's perfectly choreographed script of pin-prick silences, flawlessly arrayed white Cathedrals (paintings hanging as if imbedded in the walls like stained glass), and spectators corralled by frowning guards. This is the other feast, the one you never get invited to, whose atmospheric effects poke holes in Nemo's suffocating Bell Jar, allowing any viewer who is so inclined to breathe in their air of giddy optimism, the complicit back-stage thrill as Brunner casually debunks the museum's Gepetto-like sleight of hand. Sure, the street's electronic lamentation spills out of passing cars and crowded boutiques right outside the door, but in a Brunner painting that atonal symphony is held at bay, implied so that the glittering coins cast in MoMA's reflecting pool not only act as felicitous tools of disruption, but keep us guessing as to what, exactly, were the wishes once attached to them.

A peek at Brunner's own bag of tricks might be instructive here. In 45º MoMA #3, 2005, a black horizontal band marks the uppermost horizon line, strangely resembling film stock leader. Brunner enhances this conceit by arranging the paintings sequentially on the gallery walls, as if he were orchestrating some gigantic canvas flip-book. This is an apt strategy in a current painting climate that exalts the grandeur of the static icon floating in anti-gravitational space, shorn of any earthbound signifiers, at the expense of sequential land-lubbing narrative. Timeless and out of time, natch, most contemporary painting attempts to soft pedal duration in the hope of inflicting its primordial facticity upon the viewer as irreducible (and inarguable) law. But here, Brunner's asphalt-hued bands are exactly that: a sparkling concrete sidewalk that frames the topmost edge because the image we are looking at is the upside down reflection cast from the nearby pool.

Brunner offers himself up as a humble chronicler of the moment, hinting to the collaged fragments of his photographic archive, but always careful not to impinge on the viewer's own encyclopedic memory bank by suggesting his own triumphal Olympian authority. Reflections, after all, split the difference between microscope and telescope, collapsing the zone between focus and withdrawal so that all elements of the composition, whether great or small, crucial or indifferent afterthoughts, become all of a piece. This bears mentioning since, as I indicated before, Brunner is not one to shy away from the director's bullhorn or the conductor's baton. In staunch opposition to the tyrannical Nemo - throwing tantrums in his lonely ghost ship when he doesn't get his way - Brunner is careful not to dismiss the viewer's own subjectivity by force-feeding the warped lassitude of his reflected images down our throats as non-negotiable law. The mirror's own funhouse distortions, intrinsically unreliable to begin with, see to that.

Additionally, he finesses a number of things with this transposition, not least the further hallucination of academic figure/ground relationships and the classical receding perspective that's held sway since as far back as the Renaissance. Rather than adopting Richter-esque dissolves and fades in winking acknowledgement of the primacy of photography over the naked eye, Brunner merely faithfully records the natural oscillation effect of figures reflected in a shimmering pool. Granted, both figure and architecture in a Brunner painting are already inverted, so by contrast, Richter's soft-focus halos - though today's gold standard in "melancholy morphology" - have the unintended effect of coating the German's work in allegorical amber. Ultimately then, Richter is thumbing backward through the dog-eared pages of history, conjuring sentimental nostalgia even before the image is fully apprehended by the mind's eye, while Brunner, ever the gentle beguiler, pens concrete visual poems in the present tense, whose loose arrangement of words on a page yield meaning only if you walk a leisurely mile in their comfortable shoes, only if you sincerely attempt to reassemble their mute parts into a personally customized whole. His paintings, if we set aside the clinical analysis for a moment, are more like the Nautilus' own kinetic thrusts: a slow meandering cruise as a form of invoking the aboriginal dreamtime-simultaneously mapping and re-enchanting the roiling depths, staking territorial claims and casting druidic spells-in the manner of a wandering aborigine chanting his tribal songline.