The first time I met Roger Hiorns was in his art-school studio in the mid-’90s. I asked him what he was doing and he told me, without any explanation or justification, that he was growing copper sulfate crystals. Something pure, geometrically clear-cut, and graspable was solidifying out of liquid incoherence in the beaker before his eyes. Perhaps the basic school-boy chemistry involving the transformation from one state to another was providing a physical parallel to the more problematic and far-reaching concern with what occurs when something becomes art.

Hiorns’s recent show appeared to further

The first thing I felt as I began to take in Jeffery Camp’s paintings was a sense of heady, happy displacement. Here was something unexpected, something that blithely upended my categories for receiving and “placing” contemporary art. Part of that reaction has to do with context, of which we critics are not supposed to take much notice but which can hardly help but condition our expectations. In the case of Browse & Darby—a venerable venue that, as Camp, himself remarks in the exhibition catalogue, “will always be thought of as Euan Uglow’s gallery”—those expectations are of something