Russell Floersch’s elegantly painted surfaces combine ghostly references to commercial real-estate advertisements with virtuoso graphic and painterly techniques. Brooklyn-based Floersch is subtly political in his fragmented, faded graphite drawings of seductively ornate estates and poolside vistas that appear on small plaster areas of otherwise abstract paintings. He has developed a collage style based on the image, logo, typeface, and design of selected real-estate ads in the Sunday New York Times. Slick titles such as Bella Vista and Belvedere, both 1987–88, derive directly from the inflated