Painter Riccardo Vecchio has an eye for distinguishing features. His stately-but-funky portraits of Beck, Fidel Castro and other cultural icons have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire and Rolling Stone. For the artist’s first New York gallery exhibition, he has followed in the footsteps of his Italian forefathers to expand his repertoire into landscape painting. Over the past three years, Vecchio trained his eye on some of the world’s greatest cities, including the modernist capital of Brazil, his hometown of Milan and New York City, where he teaches at the School of Visual Arts. In the longstanding Italian tradition of artists doing double duty as architects, Vecchio creates “virtual cities.” These are places that don’t exist but look familiar to city dwellers around the world. Buildings are spliced into blocks from the other centuries and countries, as Vecchio rewrites architectural history. “Evocation of Memory: Riccardo Vecchio Paintings” will be on view at SVA’s