Since 1993, Marcel van Eeden has adopted a daily practice of making pencil-and-charcoal drawings, black and white with the occasional introduction of color. The accumulation of drawings marks the passage of his existence, yet the works do not depict moments in his own life. Instead, the images derive from all sorts of photos, ads, film stills, and so on, without indication of provenance, like a visual archive for which the documentation has been lost, or like a calendar that indicates the day of who knows what year. This is not just any past, but rather one technologically filtered by the eye

Featuring a limited palette of matte oil paints, whose saturated hues channel something of the bright, flat light of David Hockney’s Los Angeles poolscapes, Amélie Bertrand’s surrealist environments are as enticing as they are disconcerting. An odd assortment of cartoonish motifs including blank tombstones, redbrick walls, velvety sandpits, white lattice fencing, Astro turf mounds, and crenellated ramparts characterize an unpopulated terrain that is distinctly artificial, yet appealingly familiar. But alluring though they may be, these pictures are not portals. Bertrand keeps the viewer at