Art in America: Robert Rauschenberg at PaceWildenstein

Tires, painted notices, graffiti and traffic signs trail like random spoors across the romantic, ruined landscapes of Robert Rauschenberg's ongoing series of the large-scale paintings he calls "Scenarios." Rather than using collage, frottage, silkscreen and airbrush, this uncontested master of image transfer turns to the technology of the moment and a considerable archive of images. These paintings are the products of digitized pigment transfers on a support of polylaminate, a process the artist has employed for at least five years. The dozen handsomely installed 7-by-10-foot diptychs ranged around the muted walls like devotional stations in a chapel. They are occasionally funny in passages but more often somber.

The oddly nostalgic Rescue Party (2004) is bifurcated by the image of a standpipe fixed to a sheet metal wall, jauntily capped by a fast-food umbrella of many colors. Its spokes support thin wedges grading from red through orange to yellow, green, blue and purple, and then repeat the spectrum in a funky whirl of color reminiscent of the Stella "Protractors" of the late 1960s. In the lower left corner a string of Christmas-tree lights is reduced to a single yellow bulb, a reminder of yesterday's parties. The circular umbrella form is repeated in a rusted metal disk. Above, Rauschenberg juxtaposes an image of sunbathers on a boulder-strewn beach and a proportionally enormous concrete traffic divider like a high seawall beyond them, ornamented by a single warning light and a red, spray-painted command addressed to some absent highway crew: "remove."

A battered tire capped by a scrap of fender stands alone in the upper right corner of Casino (2003), a heraldic device that appears elsewhere in these paintings, like a footnote to the tire and goat of Monogram (1955-1959) that once shook the world. A storefront offers "PROMISE LAND" furniture above a display of lion, tiger and a row of empty chairs, and in the panel below, an eagle and an American flag. Images of hand-wrought signs promote Pappy's antiques and junk, classified "OK." Above are three serial images of a boy in a red baseball cap looking away to a field of catchers. A battered trailer promises "Happy Camping" to the visitors of Nomads Welcome (2002) below an acid-pink oil can balanced on two tires. In these paintings, the artist's sense of nostalgia is a force of nature, not a constructed narrative of vignettes. Like contiguous images viewed in passing from a car window, they seem serially cinematic. Still, there is little more sense of depth to Rauschenberg's picaresque narrative than there ever was.