It's always gratifying to find a younger artist who is not afraid to work in the figurative tradition and manages to bring something new to the table. Naoki Tomita (b. 1983) paints street scenes, portraits, and still lifes in oil, which he applies in big thick daubs to the canvas -- so thick that the strokes jut out of the picture plane, reflecting light and casting shadows on each other. Close-up the scenes dissolve into abstraction, but if you back up a few steps a clear-cut image materializes, nearly photorealistic in its precision.

Suburban Boy, the solo exhibition currently up at the Maho Kubota Gallery, is compact but effective in demonstrating the breadth of Tomita's oeuvre through just a few of his more recent works. Brightly lit through a large window and situated on a quiet alley in Tokyo's Aoyama district, the gallery consists of one starkly unfurnished room, the classic white cube -- a no-frills ambience well suited to contemplation of the works on the walls with minimum distraction. Owner Maho Kubota, who opened the gallery only two months ago, used to work across town at SCAI The Bathhouse, a bastion of Tokyo's contemporary art scene. In some ways her space recalls the converted bathhouse with its rigorous angles, white walls, and abundant natural light.

One wall at the Kubota is devoted to a row of the 18 x 14 cm canvases that make up the No Job series. Those portrayed here are "freeters" -- unemployed or underemployed youth who survive on low-skilled, low-paid jobs and whose ranks are growing in Japan. Some look pensive, but many smile, their faces brimming with joie de vivre. Likewise their casual, colorful attire, which is definitely not office-appropriate and suggests that these folks share a feisty, independent streak not found in the corporate canyons. Surviving on society's fringes is tough, and not always by choice, but it may be the most life-affirming option available these days. Tomita knows what it's like to be there: growing up in a nondescript town of highways, chain stores, and car lots some miles outside Tokyo, he spent his teen years in a motorcycle gang before finding an outlet for his creative impulses in art.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is a single work that occupies an entire wall, the two-by-three-meter Snowy Morning. The scene is a nearly deserted, snow- and slush-filled street outside a suburban train station. A few human figures queued at a bus stop are barely visible in the distance. The predominant color is the gray of the street, the sky, and the overhead railway. This could be anywhere in the industrialized world -- Tokyo, Chicago, Paris -- though hints like street signage and cars driving on the right suggest an American location. A stock image off the Internet, perhaps, but Tomita has transformed it by relentlessly slabbing on layer upon layer of black, white, and gray paint -- hell-bent, it seems, to instill life into asphalt, slush, and steel.