Works by the Swiss artist Jean-Frédéric Schnyder reside in the public domain of painting. For his subjects he pilfers a grab bag of the already known; the same is true of his techniques. Everything is here. Small-format paintings show landscapes, dolls, everyday objects (for example, a sugar cube); they are either painted in an amplified, expressive way, simply sketched, or hinted at pointillistically. Each painting has its unique, intrinsic signature; and each one could even have been done by any other artist—that is, if it weren’t for its relationship to the other paintings and the linking

A long, enclosed black ramp, the walls of which are topped with 20 round steel pipes lying across them, forms a space that narrows as it recedes, exerting a powerful suction that ends somewhere in the darkness. Wondering where it will end, we walk along the almost 65-foot-long wall, eventually coming upon a second structure, in back of the ramp. This structure consists of two cubes linked to the ramp by a ceiling plate. The blocks form a rectangular interior that cannot be entered. A sheet of glass separates the viewer from its leaden-gray inner walls, on which five steel tips on two facing