Today, artists who work in paint — and paint alone — seem like relics, akin to folksy storytellers in an internet-saturated era. Even the great living painters, the Rosenquists and Richters, knowingly engage in a tradition whose death has been one of acquiescence, museum-encased in a media too thoroughly canonized. Boardrooms and coffee shops will still need something to hang on their walls, sure, but how many creative young upstarts would confine their artwork to the antiquated form of paint on canvas?

Thirty or forty years ago the “death” of painting after late modernist abstraction instigated an impasse that challenged painters to re-envision new possibilities for their genre. Some painters produced works that introduced a new historicity into their art while others investigated the stylistic interplay between representational discourses.

Today, however, many artists have quietly bypassed the concerns of painting in favor of mixed media, installations, video or digital art, site specific performance and other forms that may better depict the heterogeneity of our times. Painting, perhaps, appears too decorative, too univocal, too elitist or too conservative a medium to express the dislocated subject’s anguish, elation and uncertainty in a world swamped with rapid technological and ideological collusions.

Jessica Warner’s work — now displayed in a small exhibit at The Shop downtown — either self-consciously defies or obliviously disregards these strictures since it seeks to convey both epic and intimate emotion through the untimely art of painting.

The large canvas of “Villa dei Misteri” swoons with a deep, luscious red background against which tuberous vegetation protrudes and spongiform overgrowths explode; brain-thick, bruised contusions of fungi and fern arise out of a rippling, light blue stream; tangled foliage entwines around a provoking spadix. This tableau of Pliocene life-forms rendered in maroon, sickly yellow-green and lichen orange drips and cakes with its loose application of paint.

Coruscating underwater glints — or a drifting fog-like murk, which vaguely resembles a net of interlocking plastic six-pack holders — swirl in the middle distance of a volcanic atmosphere. Nonetheless, all these forms have a crayon-like simplicity, scribbled and slapdash, flattened out and metamorphosed into pure texture.

I recognized the influence of Phillip Guston’s amorphous, incarnadine doodlebugs immediately, though Warner’s creatures, seething and pullulating with a suppressed and perhaps somehow more feminine passion, seem less humorously extroverted. The influence of the Dionysiac rites depicted on a Pompeii wall fresco, however, would have been beyond me had it not been for the titular allusion.

Knowing the reference, though, allows one to sense Warner’s transposition of an ancient, orgiastic ceremony of maenads and sileni into an organic moonscape of mold and cilia. It’s as if the dissolution of identity that women underwent during the Bacchic mysteries through ecstatic poetry, drunkenness and violent sex found its analog in the interstitial dustbunnies and braincoral, which lurk between bathroom tiles or within the unvisited crevices of our psyches.

Less burnished with an otherworldly gloss than Tanguy’s protozoans, Warner’s figures occupy a sedimentary zone between life and dead matter, animation and rigidity, abstraction and representation. They are poised in the strata of life-in-process as if burgeoning in a secret primordial cave, the fissures wherein our everyday human categories break down, melt together, imbricate and ooze out into new arrangements and accretions.

Warner also has a series of small watercolor pieces on display. Nervous, tinsel-thin lines and pastel splotches aggregate into recognizable images. Often these scenes are all-too-cute: a small school of star-shaped kissing-fish or a frog peeking out between dangling vines. They seemed designed to pacify the viewer with washed-out, easy sentiment. Little irony undercuts their kitsch.

The most unsettling watercolor of the batch is a composition that situates a frog next to gnarled undulations of cross-hatches and lines that corkscrew like crotch-hairs; perhaps a woman sprawling on a checkered blanket. Though her raised feet are discernable from the imbroglio, her torso twists and turns into a spree of abstraction; her head dissolves into a mess of suckers and tentacles.

It’s a frantic instant of orgasmic release with the hopeless frog-prince acting as counterpoint, separated across a distance of blank parchment. Does the amphibious fibber offer only a counterfeit kiss, incapable of changing into anything more charming, or is he able to evoke frenzy in the damsel despite, or even because of, his toadying?

One wonders whether painting itself is a cold, warty frog faintly croaking — or whether it can experience a renaissance to become, once again, the dashing prince that held pride of place at the court of visual arts once upon a time. Perhaps the answer depends on whether the frog’s seductive fairy tale can convince us that it still has the power to transform.