In the seventh circle of Dante's hell, there must be a special section reserved for Satoshi Ohno's new installation at The Contemporary Museum, "Prism Violet." It was in the seventh circle that Dante envisioned the particular hells faced by violent sorts, those who in life perpetrated crimes against self, other and nature.

There's much akin to that circle here, where Ohno has arranged paintings, photographs, dirt and spray paint into a serpentine exhibition space that winds around two carpet-covered mounds that pay homage to Hawai'i's volcanoes. Particularly striking are Ohno's images of trees, which mutate from an idealized snow-flocked cedar in "Yokota Tree" to the defrocked forests of a "Dead Utopia." Dante's perverse forest, in which sprouting trees are repeatedly picked bare for all eternity — the seventh circle's unique torment for the souls of suicides — can't be far away.

"Prism Violet" is Ohno's first solo museum show, and his second major appearance on American soil. The young painter, plucked from relative obscurity by Tokyo's Tomio Koyama Gallery, has exhibited this year at premiere art trade fairs from New York's Armory Show to LISTE (the "Young Art Fair" in Basel, Switzerland) and, later this year, Art Basel Miami. It's a flying start for Ohno, whose first solo show appeared at Tomio Koyama in 2006, while he was still enrolled in the master's program at Tokyo Zokei University.

So is the hype justified?

Conceptually, it may be. Ohno pins his nuanced installation on the concept of a refractive prism, applying its light-bending principles to viewers' spatial and emotional experiences of his virtual landscape. And his painted vistas of felled and stunted forests speak to human presence — both desirous and destructive — within the wilder natural world. What we are attracted to, we destroy: like moths to a flame, as the cliche goes.

To reinforce the concepts, motifs of trees and prisms appear throughout the show, some as minor stylistic variations, others as miniature thumbnails that presage the entire show's thematics, still others as tour-de-force centerpieces. In the latter category are the brilliant "Prism," an oversized mixed-media orb on paper that dominates "Prism Violet's" back wall; and "Prism Violet," a large joined diptych painting on which smaller and partial prismatic orbs float over a burnt-out forest, washing the scene in a mauve post-apocalyptic afterglow.

Other layers include various levels of realism, and a dialectic play between exterior and interior, wild and domestic, natural and artificial. Carpet sections masquerade as meadows or glaciers, covering the strange built "mountains"; unframed photos of dense forests with fallen trees read like source materials for the fantastical painted landscapes and abstractions; reflective tape and spray paint swirl organically like the soil that litters the carpet, which the artist has patterned as in traditional carpet design; and some paintings appear on raw cut canvas, others behind glass.

There's a strangeness, though, about the installation that has little to do with how successfully (or not) the environment invokes dialectic or a forested volcanic landscape. A clue to that strangeness lies in Ohno's preliminary sketch for the installation: In an ordered space, an orbic light source and towering mountains dominate a relatively serene landscape through which humans may trail, experiencing its various vistas.

Yet encountering the carefully arranged mash-up at floor level feels more like viewing into a shop window display than immersion in a landscape. Maybe it's the soil's exquisitely patterned psychedelic swirls, a la Quiksilver T-shirt design, circa 2007. Maybe it's the polite viewing distance that "keep-off-the-dirt" signs request. And maybe it's how the paintings — some recycled from Ohno's previous shows and reshuffled into this new context — are propped self-consciously at various angles around the carpeted mounds and on walls, making them seem oddly more obvious as hip commodities of our time, in which clever window dressing and clever art installation have begun to converge.

While that nagging sense of commercial artware may underscore the contrast between wildness and domesticity, it's a shame, because there's a terrifically obsessive, surreal quality to these paintings that transcends commodification. Their vision feels both new and old, innovating with nods to graffiti art, to calligraphy, and to late 19th-century French Symbolists and their more obscure contemporaries, the design-obsessed Nabis, whose organic use of line and vividly colored, heavily patterned paintings of interiors find an ideal (and less obscure) descendant in Ohno.

Perhaps more intentional are art historical quotations of two artists Ohno has previously cited: expressionist Edvard Munch, whose 1893 existential "Scream" is mimicked in Ohno's many sinuously drawn, Gothic self-portraits with flowing-hair-cum-feathery-tree-limbs; and contemporary Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, whose gigantic, hallucinogenic light orb installation at London's Tate Modern Gallery ("Weather Project," 2003) figures behind Ohno's giant, hovering "Prism" in "Prism Violet."

One gets the feeling that Ohno is a true thinker, that there's potential depth here that the installation isn't exactly serving, though it comes close. He's definitely one to watch. And if a truly good show can be made so by engaging concepts and one or two works that verge on extraordinary, then this show is truly good. Either way it's worth seeing — at the very least, to catch a glowing prism on its rise.

Marie Carvalho writes about art and literature.