Jules de Balincourt’s exhibition of twenty new paintings reprised his signature naive-style landscapes and portraits in oil on wood. But new to the French-born, US-raised and -based artist’s characteristically dystopian and politically critical oeuvre was a sense of wishful optimism. Rendered in a cheery sun-drenched palette of coral pinks, seafoam greens, turquoise blues, and sandy yellows, de Balincourt’s latest suite of peopled urban and pastoral scenes blend memory and fantasy into pleasantly absurd alternative realities.

True to their surf-inspired hues, a number of the paintings that were

Smeared with mud, Laure Prouvost’s letter of invitation for her exhibition “This is the visit” announced a tea party and an evening of “fond- razing” for her Grand Dad, described elsewhere as “a very close friend of Kurt Schwitters” who is still lost in the tunnel he’s been digging to Africa from his ramshackle cabin in England’s Lake District. At the opening, a waiter cheerfully offered “thé à la gin” in floral flea-market china—tepid Earl Gray spiked with booze. The works were linked by a low, dark-brown platform, a kind of stage for the viewer to walk on. An early video, Burrow Me, 2009,

In Katinka Bock’s recent exhibition “Populonia,” everything was a matter of fluidity—fluidity not just of gaze, but also quite literally of water, which periodically flowed through two transparent tubes winding their way across the gallery floor. This German-born, Paris-based artist seems to possess an innate sense of space—of its equilibrium and vanishing points. And it was precisely such an exit, an unexpected perspective, that she found by piercing the back wall of the gallery to uncover another space, a storeroom one would not have known was hiding there. “I had the intuition that