“See Stop Run,” an exhibition in a century-old office tower in New York’s Financial District, primarily surveys Wool’s last decade of work, though his practice dates to the 1980s. The show features the photograph of the unmarred paintings—a chronological outlier but a fitting inclusion given the show’s installation in a gutted and unrenovated office on the 19th floor of 101 Greenwich Street. Ten years after his stenciled words, floral patterns, and spray-painted squiggles filled the Guggenheim Museum’s spiraled ramp, the artist has situated his work in a dramatically less polished setting, one that recalls the degradation of his fire-ravaged studio and rekindles the punk ethos of his earlier days.

In the large, U-shaped venue, coiled cables droop from the ceiling. Uneven, partially demolished floors reveal decorative pink and black tiling, and workers have marked the walls with sooty handprints, spray-painted notes, scribbled math equations, and profane doodles. Abundant windows afford visitors impressive views of lower Manhattan and fill the space with daylight, but continuous wall space is lacking. So as a result, Wool has hung works sporadically on pockmarked columns and between windows on narrow, unpainted and unfinished walls. One framed work on paper, Untitled (2018), hangs atop a smattering of permits and other official documents, presumably left in place as authenticating evidence, if not out of legal requirement.

This property only became available to Wool in a post-COVID market that dampened demand for office rentals. Hardly the typical tenant, the artist still spent considerable capital to rent the space and bring it up to code; he even had to incorporate himself in order to “loan” his own artworks to the show. Historically, emerging artists and burgeoning institutions have capitalized on depressed economies to exhibit in unconventional locations. But financial concerns were not a motivating factor for Wool, an artist of considerable means and privilege, one with dealers likely competing to show (and sell) his work. The goal, according to an accompanying essay by the curator Anne Pontégnie, was to “escape the neutrality of contemporary art spaces.”

This strategy might seem contrived—an artist exploiting the aesthetics of ruin to enhance the grittiness of his own work—if it wasn’t so consistent with his process. Wool has long sought to challenge the integrity of his pictures, whether through degraded reproductions or by subjecting them to constant reprocessing. By presenting his paintings, sculptures, and photographs in a setting that refutes clarity and orderliness, he is once again testing his art’s resilience and adaptability.

Since the late 1990s, Wool has used erasure, obfuscation, shifts in scale, distortion, and collage to generate new imagery from preexisting works, circling back while tumbling forward. This is not immediately evident in the exhibition, where related works are not always hung together, though certain forms and patterns do echo throughout. Numerous paintings derive from a pair of folded “Rorschach” blots Wool made with enamel in 1986 (not on view). Between 2020–23, Wool painted atop digitally altered inkjet prints of these silhouette-like splotches. A group of ten hangs in a grid on one of the few walls added by the artist, but one senses that he has generated endless variations from the chance-based images. In turn, one early painting from the series, Untitled (2020), formed the basis for a pair of large silkscreens, both Untitled (2023). Nearly identical, the supersized blobs greet visitors as they exit the elevator, immediately establishing Wool’s aptitude for producing difference through repetition.

A highlight of the show is the series of knotty sculptures Wool has been fashioning over the last decade out of rancher’s wire and fencing salvaged around his home in Marfa, Texas—even though they too often disappear into the chaotic background. The jumbled scrap metal evokes tumbleweeds, but Wool achieves an impressive diversity of forms.His earliest, Untitled (2013), is a surprisingly graceful tangle of rusted barbed wire suspended at eye level like a low-slung chandelier. Untitled (2019) is an unruly, twisted cluster of wire, mesh, and metal slats. Others are more compact like densely woven nests. One of several that Wool enlarged and cast in a rosy, copper-plated bronze, Untitled (2021) perches precariously on a pedestal—a dancer in mid-pirouette. For Bad Rabbit (2022), Wool photocopied images of his wire formations to heighten the contrast and flatten the sculptures, enhancing their relationship to his painted line.

Wool’s painted and sculpted lines converge in a new mosaic, Untitled (2023). Translated from a 2021 oil painting on paper, itself a re-working of an earlier screenprint, the squared-off stones and glass mimic the pixelated distortion of the digitized source. At eleven-feet tall, it spans from floor to ceiling and looks custom-made for the site (it wasn’t). Farther uptown, in another office building—Two Manhattan West—is Wool’s first mosaic. The similar but much larger Crosstown Traffic (2023) towers over visitors in the gleaming new development’s cavernous lobby, demonstrating that the artist can also play nice with the moneyed elite. The version jammed into this exhibition is far humbler: The cloud of black, white, and dirty pink swirls better aligns with the tumult of this transitional space. Matching the hues of the venue’s exposed tiles, the mosaic appears as if it was unearthed during construction.

Wool could have easily mounted this exhibition in one of New York’s ever-expanding blue-chip galleries (two years ago, he showed many of these works in Xavier Hufken’s pristine new gallery in Brussels). But the site’s ready-made rawness befits his work’s willfully gritty energy. Ultimately, the architecture’s exposed innards draw our attention to the many layers of Wool’s recursive process, the deteriorated images buried beneath layers of scribbled paint and digital manipulation—an accumulated history of images.

It had been a while since I last felt attacked in an exhibition, but the serpent made a move and the situation could’ve ended up a lot messier than it did.

It helped that the serpent was animatronic and super stylized—but it took a moment to remember this while my body recoiled. The exhibition was Fernando Palma Rodríguez’s at Canal Projects in New York, which features a cast of robotic contraptions on view through July 27. A lone corn stalk greets visitors at the entryway, its weathered husks suggesting this corn, like other stalks throughout the show, have seen some things. Walk up a few stairs and you stare down at a large pile of dirt on the floor, above which hovers a snake with mechanized wings that flap on occasion. This is the Cincoatl snake, and it’s the star of the show.  

The snake, it turns out, is the corn’s protector. In Mesoamerican traditions, the Cincoatl snake (which is often translated as “snake-friend of maize corn,” per the wall text) defends the crop from forces that might keep it from growing. Surrounding the snake are four Chinantles, barriers made of corn stalks that are said to be an avatar of the Aztec Quetzalcoatl, a feathered-serpent deity “related to wind, Venus, the Sun, arts, knowledge, and learning.” With fangs and disquieting marble eyes, the serpents jut and lurch around the exhibition in the four cardinal directions, marking a sacred space. (One of those was the artwork that tried to attack me, but I had come in peace and survived the ordeal. The corn stayed safe, too.)

This installation—commissioned by Canal Projects, a nonprofit space in Lower Manhattan since 2022—tells of corn’s origins while meditating on Indigenous technologies. The wall text refers to the work of Chilean sociologist Luis Razeto Migliaro, who defines Indigenous technologies as tools with the capacity to cultivate life. Indeed, Rodríguez’s sculptures all come to life: Vasijas de barro con cucharas (Clay Pots with Spoon), from 2024, is an arrangement of motorized wooden utensils that clack together, like castanets. Tezcatlipoca (2017) is a tower rising above a cardboard coyote skull and topped with an old CD/cassette/MP3 boombox; from time to time, it swivels on a wheel that rolls below. Cincoatl snake (2024), the centerpiece, goes up and down, seeming to fly, albeit in a very rudimentary fashion.

Using decidedly DIY aesthetics—lots of unkempt nests of wires and circuit boards—Rodríguez makes a show of his contraptions’ elementary qualities in a way that seems to be part of the premise. In a time when technology has started to feel like an inescapable force hell-bent on destroying life, his creations serve as a reminder that it can be a tool for both destruction and creation. The hand-wrought nature of Rodríguez’s intervention offers signs of hope: the made-ness of his robotic forms suggest that some things can be taken apart—and perhaps reassembled anew.

In Melissa Cody’s 2014 weaving Good Luck, a figure known as Rainbow Man is represented as an electrical cord, his lower half culminating in a two-pronged plug. His tubular body encircles the phrase GOOD LUCK, and beneath those words, there’s a somewhat unexpected motif, formed from four right angles that meet at a central point.

Navajo viewers will understand the symbol as a whirling log, which connotes Good Luck’s titular well wishes. But to many other viewers, the symbol will likely read as a swastika. There are differences between the two symbols: a whirling log’s four angles form a square, whereas a swastika is rotated 45 degrees, creating a diamond. But those differences are subtle and easy to miss. That’s why it’s worth spending time with Cody’s whirling logs, which figure in two current New York solo shows, at MoMA PS1 and Garth Greenan Gallery.

At PS1, Navajo Transcendent (2014) shows a lone whirling log popping against a teal background. Cody rendered the ancient symbol in a pulsating pattern derived from traditional Navajo weaving that’s known as an eye dazzler: here and elsewhere, she is emphasizing the symbol’s cultural origins. In Navajo Transcendent, she has caused the sign to appear three-dimensional, rendering it with depth, as if to suggest that there are multiple vantages from which to view this symbol, both formally and culturally. Certainly, with its dazzling colors and dizzying patterns, this work contains none of the austerity or threat associated with Nazi regalia.

I’ll admit that, as a Jew, I don’t always find Cody’s works featuring this easy to take, and it seems I’m not alone in feeling that way. When I visited PS1, I overheard two visitors debating Navajo Transcendent, noting that the work is presented without a trigger warning. The institution seemed uncomfortable in its handling of the work as well. It showed the piece alongside a wall text that does not include words like “swastika” or “Nazis,” words that feel like elephants in the room. In that wall text, viewers are directed to a label for a different piece, Navajo Whirling Log, should they seek “additional context.” The text for Navajo Whirling Log notes that “misassociations with the Nazi swastika” may occur, and reminds viewers that Navajo culture “predates Nazi atrocities by millennia.” This is a fact—but so is the continued prevalence of swastikas wielded in hateful ways. It is hard not to see a Nazi symbol here.

That’s partly why, in 1940, Navajo, Papago, Apache, and Hopi leaders signed the Whirling Log Proclamation, formally agreeing to stop using the symbol. They noted that the motif had been “desecrated recently by another nation of peoples.” That excerpt appears in an explanatory text posted at Garth Greenan Gallery’s front desk, but this necessary context is mysteriously absent within PS1’s galleries. That text also states that the leaders signed the proclamation under pressure from the US government, and points out that anyway, Navajo religious practices were banned in the US until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act passed in 1978. In the intervening decades, Cody and other contemporary Navajo artists have endeavored to revive the whirling log, asking why one connotation should supplant another. Several have been met with protests, such as when, in 2017, a Washington art space removed works by Steven Leyba that featured whirling logs after backlash.

Cody’s whirling logs do make me uncomfortable, but that doesn’t mean her works that feature them should be taken down. Her tapestry Navajo Whirling Log (2019), at PS1, features four such logs that touch their tips, forming a cross at the work’s center. The cross is a symbol for the Spider Woman who, according to Navajo tradition, wove the universe into being. Anyone who views this piece as representing four swastikas, then stops there, is likely to miss out on that rich story. Art often shows us how many signs have more than one meaning, and if we keep an open mind—and, maybe, get uncomfortable—we might learn to see things anew. 

Who is Jay Lynn Gomez? That question animates the artist’s current exhibition at P.P.O.W in New York, and the answer is a bit complicated, ever evolving. Titled “Under Construction” and on view through June 15, the show poignantly and earnestly depicts Gomez’s gender transition—a process encumbered by the fact that Gomez had already achieved some art-world acclaim using her former name, having exhibited in major group shows like “¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and “Day Jobs” at the Blanton Museum of Art.

In 30 some paintings and mixed-media works, many of them self-portraits, we see Gomez contending with her new life. We see her newly subject to the leering gaze of construction workers, and getting accosted by a white woman for using the women’s bathroom at Fenway Park. Elsewhere, in one of the show’s best works, a 2024 canvas titled I am a work in progress, we see Gomez as her former male self, painting a vision of a woman of her own making, as she now wants to be seen. Next to her palette and brushes, we see her gender-affirming medications. Behind him a woman, the artist’s mother, dusts off one of Gomez’s earlier works.

Earlier this year, the artist began painting scenes from her transition directly onto her hormone packaging. The earliest work from this series is titled shot day (all works 2024); it is a tender self-portrait showing the artist injecting her abdomen with hormones. The piece, measuring just over 3 by 6 inches, is painted directly onto the flattened box of Gomez’s Estradiol valerate, her legal name partially visible. This work joins about a dozen other small drawings of Gomez at various stages in her life, all painted on her hormone packaging. This use of found cardboard recalls an earlier series, begun in 2013, in which Gomez painted Latinx domestic workers—gardeners tending to manicured lawns, pool cleaners fishing for leaves—onto magazine pages displaying beautiful mansions that they keep pristine; Gomez later scaled these drawings up to David Hockney-esque paintings. Her objective then as now is to show those who have been marginalized or rendered invisible.

In “Under Construction,” she gives her own process of transitioning a rare kind of visibility, carving an ideal image of herself while also grappling with how the world sees her. But she doesn’t stop there: she also honors the enormous contributions that trans women of color have made toward civil rights for queer people. These women have often been, until recently, intentionally erased from history; Gomez pays homage to some in a monumental work titled Trans women of color that includes Sylvia Rivera, Cecilia Gentili, and Erotica Divine.

But visibility has its downsides. Gomez confronts them in Every day I walk outside is a leap of Faith (Walking with Alok), which shows the artist in a black bra, staring in the mirror as she shaves her upper lip. Behind her, a canary flies out of a gold cage, and in one corner Gomez has kissed the canvas with a pair of a bright-red lips. In the foreground is Alok, a gender non-conforming poet and comedian who has been a mentor to Gomez during her transition. The two are surrounded by leering construction workers and signs reading ROAD CLOSED and DETOUR. There’s tension in this scene: like the overlooked laborers in their high visibility orange, Gomez and Alok appear both hyper-visible, and yet invisible, too.

That painting is untethered to any real space: instead, the figures float in a purple void. Gomez uses purples often, perhaps referencing the swirling together of the colors of the trans flag (pink, cyan, and white), or even the spectrum of hues in a bruise: a bruise at the site of hormone injection; a bruise from hemophilia, a condition Gomez has; a bruise that refers to the violence that trans women of color often face, whether from lovers, from johns, or even from catcalling construction workers.

At the back of the exhibition, there is a sculptural intervention. There, Gomez has installed a chain-link fence covered by a green tarp, with diagrams of her facial feminization and breast augmentation surgeries painted onto the surface. Surrounding these diagrams are outlines of butterflies: the ultimate symbol of transformation. A sign on the floor warns: “WERK ZONE.” Nearby, Gomez has dedicated a poem to her friend Winter Camilla Rose—also depicted in a leisurely odalisque portrait—about “a journey with no guide / with no end.”

Anyone who has been affected by the protests roiling college campuses in recent weeks—which is to say everyone, given the range of emotions they elicit and their magnitude in terms of reverberation and reach—would be advised to visit David Huffman’s current show at Casey Kaplan gallery in New York. A short walk away from the Fashion Institute of Technology, where a student encampment was broken up by the NYPD just last week, a selection of paintings that the artist calls “social abstractions” affirms the ways that protests from decades ago can resonate today.

Deeply personal but powerful beyond the bounds of his own experience, Huffman’s densely layered paintings draw on aspects of his childhood during the Black Power Movement in the 1960s and ’70s. Growing up in Berkeley, California, he was steeped in the activism of the Black Panthers; his mother, Dolores Davis, marched with the group and designed a slinking panther logo and a “Free Huey [Newton]” flag for them in 1968.

Allusions to those early years abound in paintings that can be read as diaristic. Eucalyptus (2024) includes part of a photograph (cut out and affixed to the canvas) of a very young Huffman and his brother standing alongside Black Panthers cofounder Bobby Seale. Other paintings are marked with stenciled repetitions of words like “mental health,” “homeless,” and “payday loans”—socioeconomic causes relevant both then and now. In its upper right corner, amid swirls and scrapings of paint, Mintaka (2023) features 13 iterations of the black panther logo that the artist’s mother designed.

Other references are just as personal but more open-ended. Many of the works include collaged swaths of African fabric that Huffman has collected over the years, with a mix of amorphous and geometric patterns that he sometimes adorns with additional squiggles and lines from his own hand. An especially dynamic part of Tasmanian Ghetto (2023), with electric orange set against a deep blue, was created by spray-painting a basketball net set against the canvas. A flurry of stenciled sphinx heads in Calypso (2023) signals the ancient Egyptian origins of so much culture. And then there are several Afrofuturist allusions to outer space: cut-outs of planets float within a few of the works, and part of Eucalyptus (the painting with the photo of Bobby Seale) is marked with the letters “ZR,” a reference to the Zeta Reticuli star system that figures in numerous tales of UFOs and alien abduction.

Familiarity with Huffman’s biography and personal inclinations helps bear out the activist allegiances in his work, but the paintings themselves communicate it in no uncertain terms too. All of them roil and teem, created in what seem to have been thrilling bursts of energy and animated by a frenetic spirit that informs a mix of determination and purpose, messiness and garishness. The look of them evokes the mind-expanding legacies of both the psychedelic counterculture and the activist uprisings that marked Huffman’s youth. The paintings’ backstories resonate with the unrest of the present, but their lingering effects make the current political climate feel less fleeting and more like an ever-present condition always in need of attention.

One of the most memorable sections of this year’s Venice Biennale is a vast room hung floor to ceiling with abstract works, many of them by dead artists. The star of this room—the pieces I can’t stop thinking about—appear not on the overcrowded walls, but in the space’s center, suspended from the ceiling.

That series, titled “Bambus,” is by Ione Saldanha (1919–2001). The late Brazilian artist painted the works on pieces of bamboo that she’d let dry over the course of six months, and in some cases even longer, before priming them with white paint and then adding bands of glorious color. These sculptures, which Saldanha started making in 1960, resemble a phantasmagorical forest in which each tree is a painting. If only it were possible to walk among them and see them from all sides.

A few select “Bambu” sculptures are on view in New York, at Salon 94, where Saldanha is being given her first-ever US solo show more than 20 years after her death. In this exhibition, one can get up close to a “Bambu” from 1980: the lithe, cadmium-colored object is ringed with white stripes, pastel blue checks, and other such markings.

Before making paintings that command three-dimensional space, Saldanha made paintings of voluminous spaces—albeit with similar planes of flat color. The earliest works on view in New York, dating from 1950, are urban scenes, views of Brazil’s Bahia state. She focused on clusters of buildings, but stripped their rectangular planes of detail, flattening them with that same eclectic mix of vibrant shades found in the “Bambus.” In both, hues range wildly, from bubblegum pink to hunter green, from pumpkin orange to butter yellow.

But buildings gradually disappeared from Saldanha’s work, and by the start of the ’60s, she was focused on abstraction. Still, the gridded windows and repeating doors from these paintings linger on as the structure undergirding an untitled painting from 1963. On this canvas, gridded elements form a drippy patchwork. The checkered, stripey patterns look just like the ones that ring the “Bambus” she started making around that time.

Bringing these forms beyond the canvas, Saldanha’s work was in direct dialogue with that of other Brazilian artists of her generation, most notably those involved in the Neo-Concrete movement, such as Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, who tried to infuse sensuality into abstract painting by having their works fold up or jut out off the wall, into the gallery. But Saldanha never left the wall behind entirely. Even as she created her “Bambus,” she continued to paint on canvas, ping-ponging back and forth between abstract painting and physical space.

A 1966 canvas included in the Salon 94 show, for example, features a “Bambu”-like stack of colored rectangles, one of them striped. To the pile’s left, Saldanha painted a swatch of gray, leaving it rough in a way that recalls the surfaces of her sanded, dried bamboos. To its right, she painted a brown monochrome with a cream-colored orb at its center, alluding to the circular top of a “Bambu.”

Which is to say, Saldanha seems to have started with three-dimensional space—urban buildings—then abstracted it into flattened planes, only to bring it back into the sculptural realm in the form of towering tubes. Then she flattened those forms all over again, in a generative cycle that lasted decades.

Cattelan’s bet that art viewers are a bunch of masochists has paid off: the press release claims that he is “the most famous Italian artist since Caravaggio.” I rolled my eyes when reading this at first, before conceding that it’s also probably true. And annoy me as he does, I still eagerly await Cattelan’s next move. I just hope it’s funnier.


Image: View of Maurizio Cattelan’s 2024 exhibition “Sunday” at Gagosian, New York.

Herding cats is notoriously difficult, but how about making them harmonize? That is a hypothetical taken up long ago in a curious 17th-century musical text—and again more recently by the British sound artist Oliver Beer. His latest gallery show in New York, “Resonance Paintings – Cat Orchestra” at Almine Rech, involves a probably apocryphal contraption (one hopes!) called the Cat Piano devised by Athanasius Kircher. In Musurgia Universalis, a book published in 1650, Kircher described the instrument as a collection of cats in cages that would shriek, in different voices, each time one of its tails was struck by a spike triggered by fingers playing a keyboard.

Beer brought Kircher’s vision to life—albeit in a much gentler version. The centerpiece of his show is an arrangement of 37 cat-shaped vessels and figurines, including a feline absinthe pitcher from early 20th-century France, a 19th-century ceramic cat “pillow” used as a headrest by opium smokers in China, and a recent replica of a fierce guardian lion from Thailand. All of the found objects are connected to microphones situated to pick up different frequencies that resonate inside of each hollow form. A custom keyboard sits in front of the orchestra, as it were, and conducts it in an automated fashion, with sliders moving up and down to show which cats’ voices are “singing” at any given moment. (Gallery-goers can sit at the keyboard and play it by hand too, but during all my visits everyone kept a curious distance.)

The mood of the music the orchestra plays is transporting, ambient in a manner similar to latter-day Brian Eno compositions for his 77 Million Paintings installation project started in 2006. And the variety of the vessels and figurines enlisted—ranging from campy tchotchkes to elegant historical finery—helps direct attention away from the technological makeup of the work to its more playful, experiential effects. This is not severe, austere sound art by any stretch.

The show also includes Reanimation (Everybody Wants to Be a Cat), a 2024 film made with school kids’ drawings of a scene in the movie The Aristocats (1970), and a pair of “Recomposition” wall works (both 2024) that feature broken bits of cat sculptures and other objects (feathers, guitar strings, parts of an old clock) preserved in resin. But most notable visually is a series of nine “Resonance Paintings” (2024) that Beer made by casting powdered pigment on canvases laid over amplifiers playing sounds from the cats in the orchestra. The results are all abstract modulations of blue on white, and knowing that they were made in part by sound gives them a sort of synesthetic presence. They’re silent, of course, but also audible in their way.

At the start of the 1970s, Jonas, who was born in New York, had been exposed to the downtown avant-garde scene populated by the likes of Young—a minimalist composer and Fluxus member whose influences included Japanese classical music—but had not yet discovered a formal language that resonated with her. As subtly argued throughout “Good Night Good Morning,” Noh is the skeleton key to Jonas’s oeuvre. In the artist’s first New York retrospective, MoMA’s sixth-floor galleries demonstrate how Jonas effectively deconstructed and assimilated the basic formal elements of Noh—woodblock acoustics; slow, simple gestures; and the use of masks—into five decades of performances, videos, and installations.

Following her first trip to Japan with the late Richard Serra, Jonas performed Jones Beach Dance (1971) on the Long Island shore. Commandeering a tidal flat, she placed a ladder in the sand and stood on it while holding a large rectangular mirror, which beamed sunlight toward an audience more than a thousand feet away. In Richard Landry’s photographs of the performance displayed in the first gallery of the exhibition, one sees Jonas on the ladder, as well as the wooden blocks she struck to create the piece’s sonic atmosphere. In the same gallery, crisp, resonant clacks issue from Songdelay (1973), a black-and-white video projection transferred from 16mm film. In one sequence, a performer stands in front of a passing boat in Lower Manhattan striking two blocks overhead. The figure, centered in the frame but filmed at a distance, appears small and remote, like a ceremonial functionary.

In Japan, Jonas purchased a Sony Portapak, a newly released handheld camera that proved crucial to her practice. In her SoHo loft, Jonas used it to film her well-known work Vertical Roll (1972),a 20-minute closed-circuit video performance that alternatingly exposes and occludes parts of her body by way of an ongoing televisual glitch. The richly saturated photographs of Béatrice Heyligers show Jonas executing a performance adaptation of Vertical Roll at the Festival d’Automne in Paris in 1973. In one of these images, Jonas wears a crown of peacock feathers, her face covered by a plastic mask, its pearly surface flushed with rouge. The doll-face mask, procured from a sex shop in New York’s Times Square, transforms her into her alter ego, Organic Honey, whom she calls “an erotic electronic seductress.” It is remarkable how intuitively Jonas’s early video performances embody and extend the possibilities of masked choreography.

Other Japanese elements that appear in Jonas’s work—kimonos, ink art, shoji screens, and kites—serve as conspicuous markers of cultural difference that render the resulting works more complex and poignant. Jonas’s 1976 interpretation of a Brothers Grimm tale, The Juniper Tree, features a spare wooden house, a dried branch, an apple, a mask, drip-painted silk banners, and a pale blue kimono. Embroidered with red and gold blossoms, silver branches, green leaves, and opalescent birds, the garment hangs from a ladder, evoking a scene in the fairy tale in which a dead child beneath a juniper is resurrected as a songbird. Unlike the sound of woodblocks, which derive from Noh but could just as easily conjure the notion of a Western orchestra, the kimono is too specific in its material and design to shed its associations as a cultural signifier. This is perhaps why it catches the eye: it appears simultaneously melancholy and radiant, exalted and displaced, refusing to blend into its surroundings.

Ink features prominently in Jonas’s multimedia installation Double Lunar Rabbits (2010). In Japan, where the installation was first exhibited, the lunar rabbit is a figure in a myth from the Buddhist Jataka tales, where a rabbit sacrifices itself in a fire so that an old man may eat and, as a reward, has its image carved on the moon. Accordingly, seven works on paper arranged on a black wall depict a lean hare from various angles. Jonas’s blunt linework evokes the tactile sensation of someone scratching a faraway surface. Two shoji screens—room dividers used in domestic settings—displaying videos in which the performer Ayano Momoda wears a white bunny mask around the city of Kitakyushu complete the installation. Altogether, the component parts of Double Lunar Rabbits present an ambiguous and fragmentary reenactment of the myth, and generate a productive tension between the anonymizing powers of the mask and the specificity of the surrounding cultural cues that give it meaning. Over the years, Jonas’s commitment to cultural eclecticism has been premised on this sort of necessary tension, as well as a degree of distance and spontaneity. As if to illustrate this point, “Good Night Good Morning” concludes with By a Thread in the Wind (2014/2024), a work comprising three rows of hanging bamboo kites. With red, yellow, orange, and green surfaces that reprise the palette of The Juniper Tree’s wistful kimono, the kites evoke images of birds, gourds, houses, leaves, and fruit. Conceptually, they call back to Jonas’s early studies of how light, sound, and other signals travel through air and extend perception into space, connecting distant entities without subsuming one into the other.

Scribbled numbers, wiped-away letters, word-like scrawls: all of these recur in Kikuo Saito’s paintings of the early 1990s, a selection of which form a wonderfully mystifying solo show on view now at James Fuentes gallery in New York. The cryptic markings are cast against vast fields of color that, in the hands of an Abstract Expressionist like Mark Rothko or Barnett Newman, might inspire transcendence. But Saito’s color fields are thinly painted, purposefully left rough-hewn and off-kilter, and the illegible messages on their surfaces evoke something more like the intriguing thrill of communicating with a person channeling an alien tongue. 

These canvases may in some way reflect Saito’s own experience as an immigrant absorbing a new culture. He was born in 1939 in Tokyo and came to artistic maturity in the wake of the Gutai movement of postwar Japan. Lured by the Abstract Expressionist art pouring out of the US, he departed his homeland for New York in 1966, eventually working as an assistant to artists Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, and Larry Poons. His art has affinities with theirs—for works from other eras not included in the James Fuentes show, Saito created Poons-like torrents of brushstrokes and Frankenthaler-like blooms of color. 

But the abstractions in this exhibition are more inscrutable—and tantalizing too. I thought I spotted the word “agony” in Mock Orange (1992) and considered whether the work’s blazing hue was meant as an expression of turmoil. Then I realized that certain characters were blurred beyond recognition—I’d misread that word, and perhaps the painting altogether. Maybe the would-be text bore no relation at all to the fiery field behind it, or maybe it connected in ways I can never fully know. 

Saito labeled these ’90s works “Monochromes,” which is itself a clever linguistic sleight of hand, since the large canvases are covered with more than one color. The title of Mock Orange reads like a reference to the fact that this vermilion canvas actually contains smears of yellow. If some of his painterly peers found respite in pared-down abstraction—recall Ad Reinhardt’s obsession with “purity” as the finest form of aesthetics—Saito was interested in intentionally muddying his expansive planes of color. 

Can these paintings’ mysteries be unraveled at all? Most works are titled in cryptic ways, but one seems to offer a means for understanding. Moon Tree (1993), a blackboard-scaled field of lush magenta, can be read as an allusion to tree seeds that were flown around the moon by Apollo 14 astronauts in 1971, then planted in sites around the US. The painting has no obvious relationship to those seeds, but Saito evokes a foray into outer space, a realm that remains only partially understood. A phrase that looks like “Amoxina inoi sn x20” also appears in the painting. Its meaning is elusive to me, but Saito might have intended it for other kinds of beings who can decipher it.