In his latest works, Jean Le Gac indirectly follows a tale of a painter’s adventures who is none other than himself—all the action is more or less faithful to Le Gac’s “real” biography. His works, since his mail-art and the Cahiers (Notebooks, 1989), can be considered self-portraits. The formal novelty in his two latest series—“Les Grandes Vacances ou le Prisonnier” (The great vacations or the prisoner, 1991–92) and “By Jove,” 1991–92—is considerable. Whereas in previous works, painting itself was implicit—referred to but absent—here we find massive areas of color on the canvas, associated on

Corinne Mercadier’s photographs are like memories: they evoke places, times, and moods that the mind’s eye fuses into slightly faded compositions. The 20 works in this series—uniformly small, square, and untitled—offer fragmentary glimpses of a seaside town in southeastern France (the same one where Jean-Jacques Beineix filmed Betty Blue, 1986). In these unassuming views of beaches, boats, jetties, and rows of wood-frame houses, Mercadier explores and reconstitutes the private face of public space. There are no people to serve as markers of space or scale, only the ambiguous play of surface and