As a painter, Mark Innerst is an intimist of spectacle. The closely held visual language of quiet French domestic scenes — think Édouard Vuillard or Pierre Bonnard — is relocated into the modern, usually urban American public sphere, where it blows up into a showy pageantry of anonymous pomp and circumstance.

In many ways, painter Mark Innerst could be considered a contemporary modernist. His works align with American painters like Charles Sheeler and Joseph Stella that were active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who celebrated cities and industrial societies.

Like a huge butcher’s mallet, a slab of silvery architecture seems poised to crush a multilevel aggregation of urban commuters, cowering in a bluish, semi-dark tunnel. This painting, “Strata,” shows a rare intersection between the two principle worlds of painter Mark Innerst, who is showing 28 new works at the Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles.

In the 1980s, a decade when artists commonly appropriated styles or imagery from earlier art historical periods, Mark Innerst became known for beautifully crafted natural and urban landscape paintings that gave new life to the American tradition of the romantic sublime.

Few artists capture the awe and beauty of the built environment like Mark Innerst. His gleaming, vertiginous skyscrapers, sometimes abstracted into pure shape and color, reflect a love for both painting and urban life reminiscent of the affection paid to nature in more traditional landscape painting.