Busy shipyards, city streets, rain-streaked skyscrapers and other iconic staples of cities come alive in this portfolio of shadowy oil paintings.

Valerio D’Ospina captures movement in the strokes of his brush, but the blurred results also take on that uncanny real-yet-indistinct character of a dream or memory, a little like the work of Alexandra Pacura.

Born in Italy, Valerio studied in Florence, painted in Paris and eventually moved to Pennsylvania – his range of industrial subjects reflects studies of historic Europe as well as the infrastructure of the United States.

He was trained to teach, but has since turned toward full-time creation. From his bio: “After this teaching experience he decided to focus exclusively on painting, receiving positive feedback from private collectors and galleries from around the world.”

Stretching and reversing conventions for balancing foreground and background, one urban photographer in Tokyo is taking the Japanese concept of Bokeh to dazzling extremes.

Bokeh (which translates as ‘blur’) plays with a lens’s circle of confusion in which points of light become glowing discs, but instead of making the background fuzzy, Takashi Kitajima unexpectedly lets the foreground become the backdrop.

The result seems to highlight the chaos and movement of what is closest to the viewer’s perspective in a surreal but suggestive way that indirectly resonates with our actual experience of cities.

In turn, more distant monuments, buildings and bridges on the horizon or off to one side emerge as stable anchors, contrasted with a sea of light.

The net effect is something between a photograph and a watercolor or pastel painting, a fusion of concrete realism and playful abstraction.