Not all strange scenarios engender wonder, but Gonzalo Puch's do. In his first solo exhibition outside his native country, the Spanish artist presents five giant color photographs of “Incidentes,” neutrally set in a classroom or a room in his apartment, that induce delighted puzzlement. How did all those plastic water bottles end up precariously stacked atop a simple coffee table, plant cuttings sprouting from their cut tops, a vine of plastic grapes dangling ridiculously from a string up above? That man, lying under the room-sized globe covered in paper maps—is he being crushed? Or is he Atlas, holding the world aloft with his breath, blown into the globe via a little green tube? And what mathematical problem could be so enormously complicated that its would-be solver must cover the walls with endless numbers—which he cuts, serenely, from white foamcore? Wonder—that state of confusion that knows nothing of fear and everything of pleasure—finds fertile ground in Puch's casually constructed situations. Not getting it has rarely felt so right.

— Lori Waxman