A revealing detail: New York–based Diti Almog’s paintings are done in acrylic on aircraft plywood. Now, when Yve-Alain Bois wrote his famous essay “Painting as Model,” he surely didn’t have model planes in mind. Yet Almog succeeds in suggesting that painting-as-paradigm and painting-as-toy are not as different as one might have thought. Her works approach the status of painting by constituting a facsimile of it.

The handy thing about miniaturized replicas is that you can hold them in your hand, and thereby examine them from various angles as well as various distances. Questions of scale and