Merlin Carpenter -- 'Children of the Projects'

American Fine Arts

Like a grunge-generation descendant of the Social Magic Realist Philip Evergood, Merlin Carpenter has created a suite of brushy, intentionally clumsy and overbearingly sentimental paintings that allegorize the plight of poor urban children. A boy in huge sneakers and a Lakers T-shirt, observed by a mother and child, resembles an Op-Ed page cartoon about escapist dreams of athletic success. ''The Graduate,'' a barefoot boy with a big Afro and an outsize, rolled diploma under one arm, is a lesson about realistic achievement against the odds, while two boys in hip-hop wear, one aiming a handgun at himself, illustrate suicidal tendencies nurtured by poverty.

You get the impression that something is being mocked here, but it's not clear exactly what. In the middle of the gallery, the artist has made two constructions of paint-spattered Masonite -- sections of a studio floor -- and hung fashionable black dresses on them. This is supposed to represent the world of high art from which most of Mr. Carpenter's underprivileged subjects are likely to remain distant.

It is perhaps a pre-emptive, self-critical strike intended to acknowledge the artist's own privileged status. Still, you are left to wonder -- irritably -- whether the exhibition as a whole is making fun of liberal good intentions, clichés of Social Realism or something more obscure.