A Hot Conceptualist Finds the Secret of Skin.

Is Kehinde Wiley a Conceptual subversive who happens to paint or yet another producer of pictorial fluff that makes him our latest Bouguereau? Do his big, flashy pictures of young African-American men recast as the kings, dandies, prophets and saints of European portraiture subvert the timeworn ruses of Western art and its hierarchies of race, class and sex? Or are they just a passing art-market fancy, with enough teasing irreverence, dollops of political correctness and decorative punch to look good for a while above the couches of pseudoliberal pseudocollectors? The answers to all these questions may be, Try again. ''Kehinde Wiley, the World Stage: Africa, Lagos-Dakar,'' a show of 10 of his most recent paintings at the Studio Museum in Harlem, proposes another possibility: Mr. Wiley is a young artist whose intellectual ambition and Photo Realist chops have allowed his career to get ahead of his art. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]