The new Artplace at 24 Church Street Northbridge is shaping up as an energetic venue for the best in local art. Its long narrow gallery is the perfect place to show a single person show or a well harmonised collection of paintings. Downtown Perth has long needed a quality venue like this. The opening show featured a group of aboriginal artists contemporaries and compatriots of Rover Thomas and a gloriously crowded night of celebration.

Aboriginal painting has long been important for the gallery but its forte has always been the sustained support of Perth’s younger figurative artists. Michael Doherty is a long term Artplace artist whose brilliant painting has yet to receive the support it deserves.

His New York paintings are simply superb. He is one of the few Perth painters of his generation who work consistently towards an unmistakable style, in which every mark aggregates to a precise delicate sensation. Doherty’s vision of Perth was always cast in the most surprisingly fragile light, a delicacy of touch that rang true of the town even against one’s will. He saw the Terrace at night like an cruise liner drowned in a crystal ocean, lights still blazing.

His smouldering small scale urban vision may sees at odds with the full colour wide screen extrovert city that, like it or not, is part of all our lives. Yet Doherty discovered another delirious New York, crystalline, moody, seen through Martini glass on a quiet evening or polished by the first light of a crisp autumn day.

In fact two visions of New York compete for our alien imaginations. There is the Mecca of modernity, City of the Future, concrete canyons, Gotham if you will, where everything can and must happen. Then there is the everyday city, the one that has seasons and emptiness, that makes its own landscape, the one you remember most if you ever lived there.

The same dual vision drives New York art. The Manhatten spectacular, from Mondrian and De Kooning to Warhol is only half the story. The quiet poetry of the city enraptured generations of painters. There was always the other New York the city of Marin, Marsh, Sloan, the other Stella [Joseph], and on occasion Hopper. Their work rests in tranquility in the Whitney where, no doubt, Docherty saw it.

Unusually for an Australian, Doherty chose to follow these quiet artists, passionate poets of the urban soul. His New York paintings chart his response to the place almost as a spiritual progress. He has no interest in shouting for attention – this is a strangely familiar place, seen with fresh eyes, sparkling with delight.

Everyone knows the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Flat Iron building was painted among others by John Sloan and photographed by Stieglitz, "moving toward me like the bow of monster a steamer" but glowing softly on a silver winter day. Doherty’s versions of the building take up Stieglitz’ vision. In one the Flatiron rears up from the street, glowing a crusty golden pink sunset grey that resonates with the white and pink scumbles over the dirty blue winter sky. The street too picks up the colour, part dust, part mist that surrounds the two or three figures still out walking. The dog in the lower right corner is a pure out of scale fancy but tongue flapping, full of life.

In Brooklyn Bridge II a solitary figure strides on the boardwalk. Its long perspective leads to the familiar panorama of Manhatten including the twin towers strung out on a low horizon. The sensual softness, even clumsiness of Doherty’s handling endows a sense of accessibility, of human presence to a view that, far too often has been presented as the capitalist imperial perspective par excellence. The amazing dawn sky of soft edged pink clouds completes the impression of a promise that nightclubs and lofts barely intimate.

Oddly enough the sky is omnipresent in Manhatten, something you rarely see in the movies. Doherty’s New York skies often take pride of place. In Avenue of the Americas, one of a number of entrancing small vertical paintings, warm grey clouds mist and patches of cerulean blue crown the ochre cliffs of apartment buildings along the park. Doherty is very subtle in his choice of views. so that there is always a converging perspective at hand. In this case the triangular pavement of sandstone flags at the junction of two roads.

The tactile poetry of his style is nowhere so clear as in his images of cars, the most human yet most stylised piece of engineering we know. Doherty turns them into patches of crumbling light, extensions of the buildingscape around them. Even the Guggenheim musuem loses its sharp edges to the steam and the brightness of a passing yellow cab leaks away into the grey pavement shades beneath its awning.

People are less present in the paintings than one might expect There is one spelendid portrait and a woman in a brownstone doorway. People descend into the subway like a single substance, or rise like a tide round the Chelsea markets. Mainly though Doherty excels as a topographer of magic urban landscape. This show is not to be missed.