The New Yorker

LES ROGERS

"Good Artists copy, great artists steal", Picasso supposedly said. It's a sentiment that favors Rogers, who has cribbed and episode from the Spanish master's biography and used it as fodder for his current body of work. Picasso's portrait of Sylvette David, a young French woman he met in the early fifties, are updated here in Photo-Realist paintings of a girl named Lindsey, whom Rogers discovered, naturally, online,and knows only through her posted photos and missives. Lindsey's face, fringed with a fashionable mop of hair, looms over the viewer, occasionally morphing into hallucinogenic expressiomism. The brash light and oblique framing mimic digital photos taken on the fly; unilke Picasso, Rogers would rather immerse himself in Lindsey's world than "elevate" her to traditional, unwordly art-muse status.  Through March 4. (Leo Koenig Inc. 545 W.23rd St.)