The mind’s capacity to make meaningful connections from seemingly absurd juxtapositions is essential to humor and its potential to subvert language, and is intrinsic to the maneuvers that constitute both the internal and the external events of Gerard Hemsworth’s paintings. Although his images and inscriptions are handcrafted, they are cliched, reproducible signs, including those drips and marks that are often claimed to express an inner essence. In Madam I’m Adam, 1986, these signs of “expressionism” are combined with two identical images of a chimpanzee’s head. Here, through the title’s gender

Originally, this show was to have consisted entirely of new work by Ian Hamilton Finlay. But because of the artist’s many current commitments, particularly in Europe, the plans had to be modified and it became an exhibition of 22 works dating from 1966 to 1986. The effect was to stress the relevance of Finlay’s roots in the poetry of the ’60s to his present artistic activities. Curator Yves Abrioux, in his catalogue essay, remarks that Finlay’s works are “simultaneously authoritative and speculative,” echoing an often quoted statement of the artist on his efforts at concrete poetry: Finlay wrote