“Cher Peintre, Lieber Maler, Dear Painter” is the latest in a crop of international exhibitions devoted to the subject of painting. “Painting on the Move,” the Kunstmuseum Basel’s recent tour of the practice during the twentieth century, was the most exhaustive, starting with Cézanne and ending with young contemporary artists like Lucy McKenzie and Wilhelm Sasnal. The Walker Art Center’s “Painting at the Edge of the World,” 2001, and the Whitechapel London/MCA Chicago’s “Examining Pictures,” 1999, took the temperature of the present through a selective reappraisal of post-’60s painting. Whereas

Just inside the entrance, to the right, hung a very tall canvas. Its brick-colored ground was not smooth, but rather traversed by various traces: The brush marks revealed underlying layers of other colors, and the space thus created was at once tactile and vibrant, thanks to the way the matte mixture of oil and wax used by Djamel Tatah absorbs and diffuses the light that hits its surface. Cut off by the right edge of the canvas, a woman stands on the threshold. Just like her, the visitor entered the exhibition as if breaking in: transfixed for a moment, as if cautious to approach these half-length