Walking into an exhibition of Mr. Winkfield's paintings is to enter a dotty and rambunctious cosmos. It is a world that is as complex as it is concentrated as it is comical. The paintings are absurd and logical, dizzying and sober, nostalgic and up-to-date. They remind us of how uncommon a true artistic vision is. An exhibition of Mr. Winkfield's canvases based on the motif of the still life is currently on view at Tibor de Nagy Gallery.

In describing Mr. Winkfield's canvases, one is tempted to dust off the cliche of "everything but the kitchen sink." This metaphor is, however, wanting and wrong. In Mr. Winkfield's pictures, no object or motif is superfluous. Each of the artist's heraldic doohickeys, however transmuted, has a formal and iconographic import. There's not a wasted moment in his paintings, even if every moment is a veritable cornucopia of flux and incident. For all I know, the artist has already given the kitchen sink an indispensable place in his oeuvre.

Winkfield's canvases are hard-edged and clean, colorful and cartoonish. They are divided into abutting geometric planes, within which a transhistorical array of stuff rollicks and tilts. Tubes of paint, ice cream cones, brushes, fish, pipes, beakers filled with color, postcards, bubbles, books and kitch landscapes are a few of the items featured in the artist's theatrical, crazy quilts. One of Mr. Winkfield's canvases may resemble some kind of arcane game board; another may recall the stash of notes, photos and oddments affixed to a refrigerator door or the wall of an artist's studio. Imagine the archetypal depictions of royalty in a deck of cards put through a slicer-dicer with Kasimir Malevich, Yellow Submarine, children's book illustrations, a healthy dollop of Dada and Surrealism and one gets a hint of what Mr. Winkfield's art entails. He makes a precise enchantment out of a cosmopolitan clutter.

There is a collage-like sensibility to these topsy-turvy compendiums, and Mr. Winkfield delineates them with a patiently empathic touch. When he approximates the grainy texture of a newspaper photograph, it's not only a play on the quotidian nature of everyday images, but a droll addendum to his distilled and deliberate paint handling. Mr. Winkfield orchestrates his imagery within a kaleidoscopic structure that amplifies its pictoral punning.

In the painting Ice Cream (1999), he pries a Suprematist scaffolding away from its Utopian leanings and turns it into a lumbering drizzle of rain. The artist's jokes expand geometrically and take on unexpected guises. Mr. Winkfield's style doesn't settle for one-liners.

In the pictures he has done in the last 10 years or so, Mr. Winkfield has sought- and, in his best paintings, achieved- an equilibrium between a surfeit of symbols and compositional necessity. One can get a good idea of how the artist has developed by comparing the paintings at Tibor de Nagy with his works on paper, dating from the late 1970's and early 80's, in a concurrent exhibition at the Barbara Ann Levy Gallery of Contemporary Fine Art. True, the artist's stylings have been, over the past 20 years, constant. Mr. Winkfield, one might say, was ever thus. But the early works are all seams and no flow. In them, Mr. Winkfield's gallery of goofs calls attention to itself too strongly. Consequently, the viewer trips up on cute bits of shtick-like the comic book scatology of Father and Son (1982)-and the work doesn't get beyond a devilishly genteel brand of illustration. This is where marginality gets a bad name.

Mr. Winkfield has sharpened his art by all but becoming an abstract painter. It's evident that he has profited from looking at classic geometric abstraction, although what Mr. Winkfield does with neo-plasticism (and color) would have given Mondrian conniptions. The recent still-life paintings are his most integrated, if not most ambitious, canvases. This doesn't mean that the artist is immune to the occasional dud, however. Studio Still Life (1999) is a flat-footed cataloguing of curiosities, and his less complicated images feel designed rather than inhabited. But pictures like Ice Cream, Trophy (both 1999) and Still Life With Fish II (1998) hold tight without sacrificing an iota of Mr. Winkfield's discombobulated vigor. The artist's maturing powers as a painter have bolstered his art by forsaking its bits-and-pieces specificity for the fulsomeness of an encompassing whole.

In Mr. Winkfield's paintings we get a reflection, albeit as seen through a fun house mirror, of our own overextended epoch. I don't mean to encumber Mr. Winkfield by positing him as a history painter that, or imply that his art is a kind of anthropological documentation. His paintings succeed on their own terms. Yet who could fail to recognize the pace and fragmentation of the late 20th century in these rebus like pictures? And who doesn't recognize the delightfully befuddling logic Mr. Winkfield has made of it? His elaborate tinkerings with history, culture and memory encapsulate our chaotic era while pointing forward, looking back and getting sidetracked by bizarre and revealing byways. Mr. Winkfield's is an art of reach, optimism and cheek.