A painting is a reduction of the visual possibilities that the world has to offer. Light is translated through the mind and body of the painter and turned to measurements of paint on a surface.

Though you might mistake a painting for a photograph, you'd never mistake it for a view out your window. For the function of painting is not the replacement of vision (the function of video), but the reproduction of vision.

Powerful paintings challenge memory and intensify perception, because through reproduction, the painting's reduction becomes a channel for amplification. Less is more.

Exemplary works make us see colors, forms and scenes as if for the first time, giving us the opportunity to sneak up on the real world and catch God with his guard down.

Landscape painting is a genre concerned with the God-like fixing of time and place in a bubble of transcendence.

Whether working "live" or from a photograph, the landscape painter attempts to suspend forces of stone, water, wind and tree ... forever. Further, whether the subject is majestic or mundane, painters make choices regarding how to attenuate or emphasize the human history inevitably flowing through the frame.

Even if the scene is free of people, the artist him- or herself is in an implicit relationship with human presence or absence, and this is a deeply political situation. A landscape freed of people is just as much of a fantasy as one with selected individuals.

Kelly Sueda and Mary Mitsuda are spin doctors of brush, pigment and the hijacking of vision and memory. In "Recent Paintings," running through Sept. 29 at Nu'uanu Gallery in Chinatown, they turn our attention to local urban and natural landscapes. The atmosphere is crowded with works, thick with an ambivalence that borders on informality, and punctuated by multiple red sale dots ... Sueda is a local favorite.

Both artists demonstrate a preference for texture-driven abstract gestures that assemble their subject matter in blocks, patches and sweeps of color.

They render chunks of spacetime, visual placeholders selected for a capacity to supposedly transcend the moment they were contemplated and captured: Kaimuki, slopes of Palolo and Kaloko, moonlight over Makapu'u, sunrise over Malaekahana, the flip-flop between water and land at low tide.

The viewer who supplies the pre-recognition of these Hawai'i sites gets their memory completed. Someone who purposefully forgets their place and simply tries to see gets an eyeful of paint, like Robin Williams struggling with the afterlife in "What Dreams May Come."

Mitsuda dissolves or chooses not to resolve optical details, favoring an impressionistic strategy that relies on the underlying texture of the canvas. Successful examples of this approach are "Shoreline (Diamond Head)" and "Big Island (Lava and Pu'u)."

Drawing on her abstractionist roots these works are more than what they represent, generating an "optical pressure" that forces one to reconsider what is seen even when the image is turned upside down.

Opposite this approach, one can read Sueda's high-relief applications of paint as a kind of tactile intermediate, a wholly artificial bridge between the representation itself, the place represented, and the viewing experience. University Avenue never looked like this. Sugar cane and a car on fire. Big Island brush. Wet streets and neon. They all have their place in the landscape of our familiarity, but they have no real position.

What, then, should someone in Hawai'i do when confronted with the old Queen theater in Kaimuki (minus the menace of Shepard Fairey's "Obey" poster), the 4,080th rendering of Waikiki, an afterthought of red bathing suit on the beach or the tail end of a yellow garbage truck? The answer is unclear. Sueda's Ford logo (from "Three Good Things to Do With Fire") and Mitsuda's nondescript beachgoers are practically sketches that play our memory and invite us to treat the painting as an icon.

They demonstrate that what is "timeless and transcendent" in the contemporary landscape — and according to Western tradition therefore worthy of being painted — has less to do with the land than it does with expressions of culture. Though the idea of McDonalds' golden arches will outlast Diamond Head, it's fun to pretend that it won't.

This is ultimately how Mitsuda and Sueda reach (and sell to) an audience largely constrained by a local symbolic system based on commercialism and nostalgia.

After all, how many of us have given directions like "make one left when you see the old place with the Coke sign ..." And how many of us, driving in or out of O'ahu's valleys, notice how the sun paints shadows into layer-caked lava or throws a treeline into silhouette?

There is something oddly satisfying, almost narcotic, about consuming paintings that capture and project the innumerable images that have passed across our retinas, echoing mundane fragments of everyday Life.

David A.M. Goldberg is a cultural critic and writer. He is a lecturer in art, art history and American studies at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa.