A pair of shoes side by side on a white-and-blue tile floor, or a white kitchen chair standing in front of dreadful wallpaper are banal sites and thus highly forgettable. But Antonin Střížek’s clumsy, large-scale paintings of these same subjects are quite memorable. These common objects lodge in our minds; indeed, they drill their way into our memories, where they become a disquieting presence. Yet they indicate nothing but themselves and their own shabbiness, and that is precisely the point; it is this shabbiness, testifying to their poverty, bad taste, and indeed pitiable esthetic incapacity,