Brian Novatny beautifully employs a sophisticated technique of light touch and seeming tentativeness to his engaging pictures. The vulnerable quality of the artists’ mark echoes the confused, preoccupied, or uncertain sense of the figures. In the same way that the people are disconnected from one another in their environs, they are frequently similarly disjointed themselves, as their bodies and heads may be alternately painted or drawn in contast to one another, or the scale of two people in the same space disproportionate. Yet, amid all this uncertainty, Novatny’s broken stories manage to engage and delight. Novatny’s drawings are colorful, intimate works that are disconcerting and oddly charming.