Why has Raoul De Keyser’s art assumed international prominence in the last decade? Not only is he the wrong age—over sixty when his work finally began to filter out over the Belgian border in the early ’90s, now in his seventies for his first retrospective, comprising some seventy-five paintings from 1963 to the present—but his work doesn’t seem to have much to do with the big issues of recent painting: Although not programmatically abstract nor based on reduction to the monochrome or the mechanization of the painting process, neither does it evince any special fixation on the medium’s relation

Lucy Skaer’s London solo debut was entitled “The Problem in Seven Parts,”’ with the ostensible problem—intimated by the fact that this exhibition of pinned-up drawings came in not seven but nine segments—being this: Skaer appreciates material facts on an individual basis, but sequential logic is anathema to her. The Glasgow-based artist’s contribution to last year’s Beck’s Futures exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts here, for example, was a set of giveaway posters that drew attention to fugitive actions she claimed to have performed, such as secreting moth and butterfly pupae in

The last decade or so has seen a tremendous flowering of video-and film-based work by English artists—one thinks of Tacita Dean, Tracey Emin, Isaac Julien, Steve McQueen, Georgina Starr, Gillian Wearing, and Jane and Louise Wilson, among others. Lucy Gunning is the equal of any of them, so it’s a mystery why her international profile has never been quite as high. Her new video installation Esc, 2004, is a triptych. On a monitor hanging from the ceiling one sees, first of all, the spectacle of a roomful of people shaking and twitching. They are not undergoing some kind of fit or seizure, as it