It is not unusual for contemporary painters to find points of contact with nineteenth-century realism or the old masters. Such affinities are no longer seen as inherently suspect or retrograde; fortunately, those days are over. The critical question is how these connections are made and what results they bring. The work of the Romanian painter Simon Cantemir Hausì seems to have sprouted from a nineteenth-century visual world, or from the early twentieth century, when modern color burst into painting. But Hausì uses tradition as a springboard to evoke a contemporary cultural landscape. His

It has been argued that the work of Belgian duo Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys hinges largely on an investigation of psychologies, a conclusion founded in de Gruyter’s influential experience working in a Brussels community center and the recurrent focus of the artists’ videos on the interaction between eccentric characters and their settings. With “Im Reich der Sonnenfinsternis” (In the Realm of the Solar Eclipse), the artists brought forth 120 paintings and sculptures constituting the life’s work of Johannes, the melodramatic artist character from their video Das Loch (The Hole), 2010, which