One advantage of creating a narrative within a personal pictorial universe is that you can steer it in any direction you want it to go. Viewers function as voyeurs, witnesses to a mythography they will never fully decode. The work in Jo Jackson’s recent exhibition “Victory Over the Sun” at Kavi Gupta Gallery was of precisely this ilk: A dozen works on paper and a silent, looped, three-minute 16-mm film projection immersed viewers in a self-contained fantasy realm.

There’s no difficulty in identifying the components of Jackson’s repertoire—her ink drawings and watercolors depict, fairly

Primitive motifs have seeped back into painting of late as a method of denoting, if not embodying, “pure” subjectivity: Katherine Bernhardt’s Neue Wilde–esque figures and Mark Grotjahn’s cardboard mask constructions are two examples among many. This revival should come as no surprise—the impulse to establish and communicate sovereign selfhood remains fundamental, and the currently fatted marketplace only encourages its indulgence, since the fear of commercial failure still often trumps the desire to avoid played-out tropes.

In the paintings of Andrew Guenther, the primitive reappears in signifiers