Richard La Presti’s new cycle of paintings of the crowd-packed beaches of summertime Long Island is a formidable achievement. These paintings, in which dozens and even hundreds of figures congregate amidst blazing sunshine and sea and sand, combine forcefulness and elegance in ways that bear comparison with works by the greats who’ve set figures in the midst of landscapes—with the racetrack paintings of Dufy, Marquet’s crowded harbors, the Venice of Canaletto, and even Watteau’s fête champêtre. La Presti’s subject is what happens when people take off most of their clothes and bathe in the sea and bask in the sun. The artist who regards the raucous scene is a bit like the lifeguard who, in a number of paintings, is perched above the crowd in an elevated chair. La Presti is watching over the scene, vigilant, up to any challenge. To do such populous landscape paintings is quite a challenge for an artist: he must be a figure painter and a landscape painter, and be both simultaneously. La Presti, who’s forty-nine, obviously revels in the overload of elements that this genre-mixing involves. In this show—his third at the Bowery Gallery (it was in February) to center on people at the beach—he’s surveying the scene with the easy concentration of the lifeguard. His attention is unforced yet focused everywhere at once. La Presti’s brushstrokes, which used to be a bit on the choppy side, are dancing now. The brushwork is muscular but not show-off-ish.

These paintings are shot