The moral of Jean Kerbrat’s sculpture is that life consists of memory, responsibility, and death. Especially death, which is evoked, if not imposed upon us, by the very material of his most recent pieces: funereal slabs of granite and marble that hang on the walls or lie on the floor as implacable monuments to mortality. On their flat surfaces, laser-engraved in pseudotombstone style, are an assortment of texts—book indexes, front-page news stories, a personal ad, and one stranger-than-fiction but no less authentic letter from the Social Security administration announcing artist Kerbrat’s own

Richard Prince’s recent works effect a kind of postcritical involution. Momentarily abandoning the stupefying rhetoric of immediacy that characterized his earlier photographic appropriations, he is now reinscribing his work in the well-lit field of modern paradigms: by referencing the monochrome as he did in his previous “joke” paintings, by reintroducing collage and silk-screen superimpositions, and above all by coating some of his appropriations with a thin layer of white paint that is simultaneously on top of and underneath the imagery.

The lower portions of these pictures are relegated to

“Rêve, fantaisiE” (Dream, fantasy) was not only the title of this show, but, according to the three organizers (two French artists, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Bernard Joisten, and a young publisher, Elein Fleiss) the agenda of this new Parisian gallery. “Rêve, fantaisiE” resembles a magic bag from which every trick triggers a dreamlike effect post-psychedelic music, a Brazilian butterfly pinned to the wall, the play of shimmering light, furniture in the form of translucent clouds. It was an exhibition in which everything partook of the fluency of dreams—where the familiar was made strange.