Per Kirkeby’s painting has the strange quality of disorienting the viewer as much as it disorients the painterly discourse. In its lack of “tricks,” of any unusual process of facture or informing ideology, a Kirkeby painting looks the way many paintings look in our century. A painting is an event that happens in front of you, implicating color, canvas, subject matter, light, depth, space, surface, and so on, and if Kirkeby’s work is conventional in that it does all this, yet it is not necessarily traditional. For a tradition involves a privileged viewer, one who can see in a painting the way it