Since the early 2000s, Diogo Pimentão has been obsessively questioning the conventions and possibilities of drawing. Paper and graphite are the raw materials par excellence through which this London-based Portuguese artist explores three major themes: weight, space, and materiality. For him, the experience of looking at a drawing should become a physical encounter with a three-dimensional body. Thus, the title of his recent exhibition “Oblique Gravity” evokes the forces that defy equilibrium and the way in which both objects and people constantly inhabit a space between balance and instability.

“Landscape” initially seemed a metaphorical or even ironic title for an exhibition of Rolf Julius (1939–2011), who is often pigeonholed as a sound artist and lumped with contemporaries such as John Cage, David Tudor, and Takehisa Kosugi. Employing the term literally, however, the show at Cortex Athletico (whose Bordeaux, France, gallery notably holds part of the late artist’s archives) aimed to rescue his oeuvre from this too narrow frame of reference. Here, rather than focusing on a simplistic cause-and-effect relationship between sound and image, Julius’s works on paper and multimedia sculptures

Organized by artist Laurent Grasso, “Purkinje Effect” took the idea of “dark adaptation” in color perception and used it as a curatorial conceit. The Purkinje effect refers to the way in which the eye’s relative receptivity to different colors changes according to the light, so that as our environment grows darker, we become more sensitive to shades of blue. This may explain why the gallery walls were painted a deep Prussian blue and the exhibition title rendered as an icy neon sign. The works Grasso selected, ranging (except for a couple of his own paintings) from the late-nineteenth to