Social realism has traditionally been used as a means of documenting the underclass, but the most riveting paintings in Ben Aronson’s exhibit at the Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens scrupulously document the overclass.

It’s a world of Wall Street traders and power brokers, of dark wood and soft light. There’s a touch of George Bellows in Aronson’s work, a sense of furious motion frozen with a slight blur.

The best of the paintings, “Nighthawks: Delmonico’s” nods playfully to Edward Hopper’s enigmatic panorama of characters in a lonely city by narrowing the focus.

We get two older men on either side of a young woman in a restaurant environment that reeks of money. (The palette is the same as Don Corleone’s office in “The Godfather.”) Is she bored? Is she going home with one of them? Both of them? We don’t know, but Aronson’s sense of movement within the moment - one of the men is rudely talking on a cell phone - suggests something is going to happen.

Another painting, “Gilded Window,” shows a couple being served by a waiter in an attractive hotel room as glimpsed through a window, which constitutes a nod to Hopper…or Alfred Hitchcock.

These paintings make you realize how underexamined the world of money and business is within the realm of art, probably because of a certain passive aggression on the part of artists - they need the rich and what they can provide, but they’re aloof about exposing it in their art for fear of seeming to be co-opted.

There are more than 40 works in the exhibit, mostly oils, and there are subjects that extend beyond Old and New Money. There are some attractive landscapes that, as with “Street in Old Nice,” are attractive without necessarily being distinguished. But with a couple of still lifes, especially “Flowers in Glass,” Aronson shows what can be done with color and intensity - his best work is particularly sensitive to color, with a thick, controlled impasto.

John Singer Sargent’s paintings managed to portray the rich as they wanted to be portrayed without compromising the artist’s integrity or his brilliantly observational temperment. Aronson shows signs of doing something similar. He’s a painter of great suggestiveness and dramatic strength. He’s no kid - he’s been painting for a quarter century and his work is in a lot of museums - but the best of these paintings suggest an artist who’s found his transforming subject: power.