Tom Knechtel knows how to load up a picture, but he also knows how to pare it down, and in cobbling together the intricate, ornate, and flamboyant, as well as the loose, minimal, and austere, the artist produces what ought to be visual train wrecks but instead are carnivalesque ballets, apparently choreographed on the fly. His latest offering included an elegant collection of reductive drawings punctuated by oil paintings modest in scale but grand and complex in story.

Knechtel samples Italian quattrocento, Renaissance, Mannerist, and Baroque painting; the more fantastic Northern European religious

It’s been a rough week. In rapid succession I saw a painting of Nicole Kidman as Salomé carrying the severed head of Tom Cruise; read a review of a show in which the writer, not satisfied with the phrase “jaw-dropping facility and prickly verve,” went on to invoke “Manet, Chardin, Caravaggioand Zurbaran, as well as . . . Gerhard Richter, John Curran [sic] and Kurt Kauper” for still lifes and portraits that are so stupefyingly incompetent that I can’t even feel pity for the painter; and had a tony gallerist alert me to the fact that the intriguing recent Cubist-inspired canvas I was standing