Barnaby Furnas is almost swallowed up by his most recent painting, Red Sea Parting, an 11-by-21-foot spume of clotted red that nearly covers a pair of suns in a blue sky. As the title suggests, the red that washes across the canvas could be the Red Sea just before the Egyptians follow the Israelites to their deaths. Or it could be an apocalyptic ocean of blood covering the Earth. Furnas goes back and forth about which it is, but in the end he's not quite sure it matters. He's interested in capturing the intensity of revelation, pure and simple. "I feel like religious imagery has been off-limits to artists, and that's too bad," says the son of Quaker political activists, indicating his nearby portraits of a dead Christ, based on the Shroud of Turin. "I want to take that power back."

The 33-year-old artist has long been reclaiming territory lost to kitsch or ideologues. Earlier in his career, it was history paintings: He did a series of almost Goyaesque battles and suicides—many of them evoking the Civil War—in which bullets hang in the air, Matrix-style, on their way toward targets like John Brown and Abraham Lincoln, while heads, hands, and various other body parts explode into abstract splotches of red. But Furnas's paintings aren't pure action spectaculars. One of his main inspirations is The Raft of the Medusa, Géricault's 1819 painting of a shipwreck off the west coast of Africa that killed hundreds of people. "Compositionally, it's practically perfect. I almost can't imagine a better painting," Furnas says. "But it was so strong that the Salon wouldn't take it; they wound up showing at Barnum & Bailey. That's what I want: to find out if you can still make a painting so intense they show it next to the freak show."

Furnas's penchant for combining ultramodern gore with classical themes caught the gallerist Marianne Boesky's eye when the artist was still an MFA student at Columbia. She nurtured him in group shows until he was ready to go solo in 2002. After that, he attracted the attention of buyers like Tobias Meyer (worldwide head of contemporary art at Sotheby's), Michael Ovitz, and Charles Saatchi. More recently, the New York real estate mogul and modernist-architecture fan Aby Rosen gave Furnas a show in the lobby of Lever House. The space was so large that it inspired his recent expansive paintings, on view in September at Marianne Boesky Gallery.

If the reaction of a group of thirteen-year-old kids who visited the studio for a field trip is any indication, Furnas is getting closer to the kind of impact he's been looking for. "They told me the Apocalypse paintings were unpatriotic, because of the way I used red, white, and blue." And the Jesus paintings? "They were so freaked out," he says, "they couldn't even talk about those." Furnas couldn't be more pleased. —MARK VAN DE WALLE