On a square stele of white faience ceramic, a carved skull from Papua, New Guinea, stares out at us with empty eye-sockets. This work is exemplary of Jean-Pierre Raynaud’s work from the past few years. The stele’s whiteness, symbolic of the purity that Raynaud has always sought out, together with the perennial beauty of the carved lines of the skull, manifest a desire for stability, a struggle against ephemerality and death. But this is also a vanitas, a sobering warning, not of life’s seductions (which might be reduced to the allure of estheticism and ornamentation), but of all the forces of

The history of the monochrome has never ceased to cause gnashing of teeth among those who attempt to historicize it (as if, in film, black and white had vanished with the appearance of color). Since 1965, Walravens has been working at delivering color from the history of art, that is, from the very idea of the monochrome, or, to put it another way, from its ideal solitude. His gesture could thus be said to populate the solitude with color.

He does so first by employing a range of colors that he fabricates both for his own work and for an industrial concern (Tollens). The original colors are then

What’s missing, of course, from this exhibit of Hélène Delprat’s “Théâtres” (Theaters) are the actors. But if the costumes, the props, the drawings, the masks, the cardboard sets and tiny mannequins can’t move, breathe, or recite their lines, they are still somehow astonishingly animate. There is, for example, the unlikely amalgam of silk, bubble-wrap, leather, canvas, tulle, and plastic garbage bags that cascades down the height of a wall from a papier-mâché animal mask: this is the Beast’s costume from a two-person ballet adaptation of La Belle et la Bête (The beauty and the beast), choreographed