The prints, plates, and paperworks from Barbara Bloom’s Esprit de l’escalier (Spirit of the staircase, 1988)—originally made for an installation at Hallwalls in Buffalo last spring and shown this summer at the Venice Biennale—found a perfect forum in this tiny storefront gallery. (The title of the installation is an idiomatic expression meaning “a witty remark which is thought of too late.” It refers to the inevitable staircase one is descending when the realization comes of exactly what one should have said.) Seen with copious sunshine streaming through the windows, the work reeked of a refined

This exhibition represents something of a return for Ed Paschke—a return to subject matter steeped in an invigorating and urgent air. During the past decade, Paschke has been best known for his large and scrupulously rendered paintings of vacant and depersonalized Everymen. These oversized and looming heads were of such metaphysical emptiness that their very scale seemed an affront; they came across as knowing and tired paeans to the pictorial tradition of heroic monumentality. But this exhibition of 12 paintings showed a stirring of intensity and a quickening of thought that recalled the artist’s