On first impression, Robert Russell’s second solo show of paintings at Anna Helwing Gallery, much like his debut, conformed to a familiarly Richteresque template. At issue, once more, was the relation between painting as a primary, hands-on means of producing images and all the medium’s technically assisted derivatives. As we have seen in the work of Luc Tuymans, as well as that of his numerous followers, this issue is by no means resolved. On the contrary, it demands continual rethinking in the light of every new technological development. All of these painters are concerned with the question

You’d be hard-pressed to conjure a phrase at once more earthy and more theatrical than “I won’t take anything with me when I die, those who owe me something will pay me in hell.” Miguel Rio Branco found the line scrawled on a wall in the Brazilian city of Salvador and employed it as the title of a nineteen-minute thirty-eight-second film he made between 1979 and 1981 and also as the title of this exhibition, which presented the film alongside photographs shot in Salvador in ’79. The textual lift is just one example of the artist’s penchant for finding baroque theater in the grittiest elements

Björn Copeland possesses considerable visual prowess, and his obses- sively crafted mixed-media works on paper make for compelling viewing. The Brooklyn-based artist and musician is clearly familiar with the ever-changing fashions of printed concert flyers—from acid-drenched, Bill Graham–era psychedelia to Xeroxed No Wave grit to fluorescent, ecstasy-laced rave exuberance—and evinces a catholic aesthetic that whirls a mischievous Surrealist bent, Pop referentiality (owing more to the silk screens of Eduardo Paolozzi than those of, say, Warhol), and hypnotic Op affectation into carefully synthesized