An early rite of initiation into the ways of contemporary art might be said to involve learning disdain for beautiful landscape painting. London-based Israeli artist Nogah Engler ignores this taboo, or at least she works her way around it: Her recent paintings may be landscapes, but at least they are not entirely beautiful. In fact, there is something distinctly creepy about them. It’s not just that the skies are dark and threatening, the trees bare, the terrain sere and desolate; it’s that these elements don’t quite add up. They seem to have been collaged together from torn-up bits and pieces

You might think that what makes William Daniels’s small, almost colorless paintings so exceptional is their extreme technical proficiency, but they’re more intellectually ambitious than that. Three years ago Daniels gained attention for canvases based on his own torn-cardboard tableaux of famous paintings: Cheap, homey material stood in for Mont Sainte Victoire or Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath, painstakingly reproduced, with Vija Celmins–esque levels of detail, in small brownish-gray paintings. For his recent show, Daniels covered his cardboard models in aluminum foil, and the