SIMON HANTAÏ IS OFTEN PRESENTED as Europe’s answer to Jackson Pollock: The Hungarian-born French painter was among the first on the Continent to notice and take seriously Pollock’s painting, and the abstract canvases he produced over a period of twenty-two years, from 1960 to 1982—in the medium that he called pliage, or “folding”—are also seen as a precedent for the variously “deconstructive” or “analytic” tendencies associated with a host of younger figures, including Daniel Buren and the painters of Supports/Surfaces. Yet Hantaï’s pliage works, widely exhibited in France during the

Many Conceptual artists, such as John Baldessari, who employed sign painters found in the telephone book, have let their fingers do the walking. Pauline Bastard, however, brought new meaning to that yellow-pages slogan with her exhibition “Like Jenga.” The video Les États de la matière—le mur (States of Matter—Wall; all works 2013) shows her nimbly breaking through the wall of an early-nineteenth-century stone house with her fingers, dislodging stones by picking away at the crumbling mortar. This house, located in a remote French village named Saint-Yaguen, was purchased by the artist

Halfway up one of Montmartre’s many slopes is a quiet courtyard—flanked by old peeling walls, in one of which there is a gap, revealing a sprouting plant—where a single glass door leads to the Kadist Art Foundation. This sense of an inner life growing out of or into a material structure leaks, like the sunlight, onto the exhibition inside. “L’exigence de la saudade,” indicating a demand for nostalgia, was the culmination of a three-month residency by Mumbai’s Clark House Initiative, a curatorial collaboration between Zasha Colah and Sumesh Sharma. The diverse work by twenty artists on