When the Museum of Modern Art did its “Big Pictures by Contemporary Artists” exhibition a few years ago, Esther Parada’s Past Recovery, 1979, was almost the only image that deserved the wall space it took up. Since I remembered the piece vividly 1 was glad that N.A.M.E. Gallery decided this past spring to honor Parada with the mid-career retrospective it gives each year to a Chicago artist. The show revealed how Parada’s work both led up to and, unfortunately, has since departed from this central picture, which remains her masterpiece. It is still the pinnacle of her career, the only vantage

The contemporary art scene is so frantic that young painters must feel as if the ground opens up beneath their feet every time they try to stand still a second to collect their thoughts. They have one foot planted in the past, and with the other they are trying to keep a toehold on the future. Meanwhile, the present is a bottomless chasm over which they are suspended and into which they are trying not to fall; sweat beads break out on their foreheads as they do impossibly wider and wider splits. Almost all seem to be trying to hang onto their own place in history, attempting to bridge a gap