IN HIS COOLLY PRESCIENT 1964 essay “The Book as Object,” the French novelist Michel Butor surveys the architecture of the modern printed page: an ordered space wherein we continually rehearse a repertoire of gestures, generally without giving a thought to the codes and hierarchies that structure our experience. The reading eye swivels and scans along ordained perpendiculars, but intermittently conducts tangential assays of headings, page numbers, and marginalia. Hand and mind flit back and forth between pages, turning their flat sequence into a delicately twitching time machine. And at the

A direct translation of the title of Valentin Carron’s exhibition “L’Autoroute du soleil à minuit” yields “Highway of the Sun at Midnight.” The romantic-sounding phrase evokes a real highway, the 591-mile-long toll road from Paris through Lyon to the Mediterranean at Menton; francophone vacationers, their cars stuffed with beach towels and topped with parasols and folding chairs, call this road “l’autoroute du soleil.” The highway, the first section of which opened in 1960, was designed to serve an emerging European thirst for leisure and consumption. It is an appropriate reference for the artist

Broken beehive boxes, a discarded hunting tent, a three-foot-tall wedge of eroded polyurethane: These are among the raw materials of Gyan Panchal’s latest works. Starting with man-made items scavenged from the French countryside near his home in Limousin, Panchal takes care not to efface marks made by humans, animals, chemicals or other forces of nature whose interactions with these once-functional objects predate his own. Via subtle, sometimes almost imperceptible modifications, such as the addition of a layer of dust, some gentle sanding, or a strategic fold, Panchal casts himself in the humble