We need not pretend that there is anything inherently subversive about free-standing paintings, not at a time and in a cultural milieu that seems willing to accept anything as art, whether stretched on custom strainers or duct-taped to the wall. What is, however, truly subversive (since the artworld seems intent upon that term) is a good painting—a few of which were on view last month in The Individualism of Dona Nelson at CANADA. 

Most viewers, upon encountering Lamar Peterson’s work, will go no further than to subsume the paintings under the generic category of “black figuration.” This is to be expected; most people don’t care enough about art to actually look at it (whether they admit it to themselves or not).

In an art landscape populated by chalky paintings made by people who don't care enough about their medium to learn how to use it, crowded alongside paintings based on photos by people who think paintings are just images, it shouldn't be surprising that the gallery-going masses are titillated by a painting with a nice surface.

“I’m not fit to be a mother. There’s something else I’d have to do first — to change myself from a doll to a real human being.” With these words, Nora Helmer (Sarah Wharton) leaves her husband Torvald (Stephen Dexter) at the end of Royston Coppeneger’s new translation of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House (2024).

Often, you'll hear a painter mutter enviously while looking at a painting something along the lines of ”Damn. He just did whatever the hell he wanted.” Variations of this phrase were doubtlessly uttered many times over the last month throughout the adjoining galleries of David Zwirner’s 19th Street location, where Raoul de Keyser’s paintings hang on the walls, their apparent haphazardness inoffensively contrasting with the sky-lit gallery space.

This conversation of Alix Le Méléder with historian Nina Léger and philosopher Jean Daniélou originally took place at the artist’s home in Burgundy in the summer of 2015, four years after she had resolved to cease her activities as a painter.

Visiting the Noguchi Museum recently, I was struck by the difficulty of sculpture as art: how it's constrained by its physical presence to a degree that other media, like music, painting, and poetry, are not.

After Effect — James Turrell’s latest “Wedgework” (recently presented by Pace) — takes up this question of the imaginary dimensions of time and space and their relationship to perception, memory, and thought.