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A heavy rainstorm is swooping through a colorful intersection of stores and apartments, streets and sidewalks. Like a typical big city corner, this one is jam-packed with shoppers, workers, and vehicles.

Unraveling Robert Barnes’ paintings, such as Ragno’s Place, is an exercise in sorting out how we arrive at “reality.” Even though his paintings are usually figurative and seem to tell a story, their stories are enigmatic and often steeped in obscure references to literature, poetry, or other artists’ works.

The “pond tokens” in this lithograph are treasures the artist has discerned from close looking at a watery scene. John Colt was not interested in exploring large vistas; rather, he said he liked the “little areas—little realms of experience, nature close up,” and his title for this work demonstrates that he liked to look at what most represented, or was a token, of one of these sites.

Trader of Green is an unusual portrait. Even though its format is a traditional close-up view of a figure shown from the front and with his head turned to the side, there are surprises.

There’s a pun in the title The Future: On the Line. Assembly line workers are building vehicles of the future, but their appearance, their functions, and their environment suggest that work life is “on the line” or on the brink of worrisome change, where humans are subservient to robots who supplant them in performing industrial tasks.