In the light, Bacher’s phosphorescent acrylic paintings are sprawling landscapes with thick, glossy, marbled layers. Many of them are primarily white, save for small touches of yellow, blue or green, like in “Viewing Manhattan.” What looks like subtle texture from a few feet away is actually thick white impasto layered with phosphorescent gel.

Then the lights go out in the gallery and a whole other exhibit emerges. The sun appears to set, turning the sky from light blue to pale pink and a brilliant and fiery orange. Streets and skylines suddenly radiate an internal glow. Stars dot the pitch black sky, streetlights cast glowing pools on empty sidewalks, and illuminated signs advertise hotel vacancies, pizza parlors and bars.

The transformation is not done. Time is as much an element in Bacher’s paintings as phosphorescents and light. He has discovered that the paintings don’t just stay lit for half an hour. “In the dark it changes colors,” he says. In “The Crown” for example, the sun has vanished into the pitch black sky. The cityscape that was rendered in blues, teals and grays in the light is now a burst of brilliant white. The Queen City Square building, which Bacher refers to as the Tiara Building, was painted in bright purple and blue in the light, but as darkness falls it turns to orange and yellow. Over forty-five minutes the orange and yellow will turn to green.

The luminosity Bacher is known for comes from his own mixture of acrylic paints with phosphorescent pigments. It is a process he invented around 1975. The crystals in the phosphorescent pigments actually absorb and hold light and then emit it in the dark.

“I never wanted to recreate what someone has already done. I wanted to do something new, that I had to figure out,” Bacher said. His techniques, including his mix of pigments, have been closely guarded.

His paintings are as quintessentially American as the urban landscapes of the Ashcan school, Edward Hopper’s lonely cityscapes and the high octane consumerism of Pop art. The neon advertisements for generic services and products that crowd his city scenes are reminiscent of Hopper or Stuart Davis.

Hopper expresses intense loneliness on banal and vacuous streets with few human inhabitants. Figures are huddled off to the side or alone in diner windows. Bacher’s cityscapes are similarly unpopulated. In “Sunset” two small silhouettes sit quietly on a bench overlooking the city, their faces turned from the viewer. The other paintings are entirely devoid of human figures, yet there is a hum of activity, as if the buildings themselves are breathing.

A series of small paintings of bicycles in Amsterdam is arguably another extension of Bacher’s Americana, celebrating a simple and leisurely way of life. The bicycles rest against the black iron railings of walking bridges. It is easy to imagine taking a stroll along the canals.

What is so eye catching about each painting is the cobblestone walkway, built up with layers of gel medium. Bacher uses different brands of gel medium for different properties.

“If I use a luminous blue with a Permanent Pigments gel, it will dry real quick and harden, whereas Golden will remain flexible and dry clear,” he explains.

In the Amsterdam Bicycle series Bacher actually mixed gel medium with watercolors. The pigment bleeds up into the gel giving the effect of glossy river stones.

When Fos-4-s-cent Met-A-more-fik Paintings closes at Cincinnati Art Galleries Bacher will get ready for a new show in Paris in the spring.

Fos-4-s-cent Met-A-more-fik Paintings continues through November 25 at Cincinnati Art Galleries, 225 East Sixth Street Cincinnati, Ohio.

—Selena Reder