There is a domestic wildness, a rhythm-as-layered-energy to Sabina Ott’s new paintings. Pigmented encaustic, poured and manipulated onto rich mahogany panels, evolves into forms that oscillate between uneven grids and tangled, intertwined lines, alternatingly suggesting roses and arteries.

Roses have been the focus of Ott’s attention for the past several years. Of course, the rose is an ancient poetic symbol, an icon of male and female, beauty and pain, love and death. But Ott’s new series of paintings, “the sub rosa series,” 1993–94, does not evoke the roses in Dante, Robert Burns, or even

Living in fin-de-millénium California, I, like Rachel Rosenthal, have felt threatened by the seemingly random, vicious violence of contemporary life and have found myself obsessing about chaos, death, and human evil. A substantial orator and actress who moves like a dancer or a queen, Rosenthal—who plays the last Russian Czarina, Alexandra—intones throughout the chiliastic spectacle Zone, 1994, about the evils of human voracity and cruelty, epitomized by the Romanov family (“assholes in brocade” as Rosenthal puts it in her typical blunt fashion). At the same time, her nihilism is tempered by an