At first you can’t tell what the paintings are. Then you notice the gruesome red spot on one, the shape of a head on the second, the bodily form lying there on the third; three paintings playing with your perception of a man who has been shot in the head.

The artist is Walker Roman, 21, who is one of four featured artists at Shephard Fine ArtSpace’s show that opened last Saturday.

Primarily a painter, Mr. Roman chose for this series a method of silk-screening an image onto numerous canvases and then painting over them. Each then emerges with a different look and feel.

“These were a direct response to a Warhol series called the [Death and] Disaster Series, which basically deals with the repetition of a single image to the point where it is no longer recognizable,” said Mr. Roman. He added that when making the pieces he was thinking about “how overexposure can lead to desensitization, how something that is fundamentally tragic can be made into entertainment.”

Mr. Roman, who grew up on Martha’s Vineyard, will be a senior at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston this coming fall. Shephard Fine ArtSpace, at 8 Uncas avenue in Oak Bluffs, where the Nye Gallery used to be, is one big open room, and the show is hung on all walls. At the opening reception, Mr. Roman wore a straw hat, red Converse sneakers, jeans, and a striped black-and-white T-shirt reminiscent of Pablo Picasso at his easel. He is certainly aware of the role persona plays for an artist.

“I really like artwork that’s very highly self-reflexive,” he said after a long pause for thought about what art he likes. “Like, a film that makes reference to its own nature as film and then makes me aware of myself as a viewer during that moment and makes me reconsider the image I’m viewing like in the context of it being a film.”

One of his works in this show is a highly calculated attempt at creating suspense in a work of art. Called Hitchcock’s Bench, it is an abstract painting Mr. Roman created after hearing an interview in which Alfred Hitchcock described the difference between surprise and suspense. It goes like this.

“Imagine the two of us are sitting on a park bench,” said Mr. Roman. “We’re two characters in a movie, and the audience is watching us and we’re talking, and then all of a sudden a bomb explodes. That’s surprise. Now let’s imagine that exact same scene, but before that scene in the film we see a third character slip a briefcase with a timer under the bench. So as soon as we get that bit of information, then suspense is created because we know at some point something is going to happen. And everything that we are saying now is loaded and is to be interpreted by the viewer on a completely different level because they know we are going to die.”

His painting attempts to create a similar sense of suspense.

“The thing I was trying to create in this painting is kind of embodying the nature of suspense, where there is something horrid in the painting and I wanted to communicate that with as much intensity as well as indirectness as I could,” he said, adding that he filled several notebooks with thoughts and sketches before embarking on the painting.

Shephard Fine ArtSpace is a new gallery on the Island, which was started by Melissa Breese and her twin sister, Melanie Kotalac. Ms. Breese and Mr. Roman met three years ago at the Old Sculpin Gallery, where she was director at the time. Mr. Roman had received a scholarship from the Martha’s Vineyard Arts Association, for which he was a featured artist at a show at the Old Sculpin.

“Every material that he used, whether it was clay or paint or printmaking, there was definitely a cohesive theme to it,” said Ms. Breese. “And you can just sort of tell, this person is going to go places. He’s a very talented artist at a very young age. And when I saw what he was working on here I just was like, ‘This is fascinating.’”

Mr. Roman’s work hangs alongside that of Steve London, Vaclav Vytlacil and Gale Rodney in this show. Also in the gallery is work by Steve Lohman and Rez Williams, both Island favorites.

This summer Mr. Roman will take a break from art school curricula to work on some projects of his own.

“I have something where I am trying to make a bunch of drawings entirely out of things that are trash or are found. And it comes down to making my own paper out of like cornhusks and making a mesh to make the paper out of beach drift scraps... and maybe finding some old bones and making bone black ink out of them. Really going every step of the process,” he said.

Mr. Roman can be found making coffee and interesting conversation at Mocha Mott’s this summer, where he works. When he is not creating, brewing or planning, he also is working as an intern at Shephard Fine ArtSpace.

The exhibition continues through Saturday, July 2.