New York Rains (section)

Rain has taken over this New York avenue, and Jeremy Mann leans all the way into the mess of it. Taillights smear into long red streaks on the wet street, taxis glow yellow through the gloom, and the skyscrapers dissolve into a pale gray fog toward the center of the scene. Mann is a contemporary American painter who builds his cities out of oil paint and a printmaking trick that lets him scrape, wipe, and layer the surface until it feels less like a photograph and more like something half remembered.

The magic sits in the distance you stand from it. Get close and the whole thing breaks apart into rough smears and scratches, but back away and the avenue clicks into place, cars and storefronts and all. Mann paints cities like this one, along with San Francisco and Tokyo, and he keeps circling back to that odd loneliness of being surrounded by people while the weather closes in. Call it a rainy-night answer to the old sunlit city painting, swapping cheerful postcard colors for a darker, quieter kind of beauty.