...Speaking of cultural marginalization, London-based artist Merlin Carpenter's current painting show at American Fine Arts is entitled "Children of the Projects". If that sounds crass, well, so is the artist's handling of the material - though I don't mean that in a bad way.

Mr. Carpenter knows how to make use of the urban realism of, say, the Ashcan School (as the curator suggests), but send it through the looking glass. There are the obvious clichés of tenement life, painted in loose, colorful strokes: children with little else except their expensive Nikes; fights in alleyways; an 8-year-old playing with a gun. But there's no "realism" in, for example, Mr. Carpenter's scene of two young boys huddled smoking while dressed in sailor's suits. What is this - Avenue D meets "Querelle"?

Mr. Carpenter left London after art school to work in Martin Kippenberger's studio in Cologne, where he later exhibtied paintings that showed the visible influence of the late artist. The rampant and darkly humorous use of stereotypical images in "Children of the Projects" shares some of Kippenberger's sensibility. If you're competing with Kippenberger on the level of biting, irreverent wit, chances are he's already won, but what could set Mr. Carpenter apart in the long run is a surreal, gently quality to a few of these paintings that counterbalances the work's more tongue-in-cheek references.

In one, a young black teenaged couple stands in the moonlight against a backdrop of crumbling urban architecture. The girl, open cell phone in hand, is stopping to lean over the lamb approaching them in the twilight. Religious, hopeful, or perhaps just bizarre, this is certainly an image full of promise.