Jan Van Imschoot is an artist’s artist, admired and respected by his colleagues but, regrettably, little known to a broader audience. The fact that he has opted for a kind of voluntary exile in the countryside of northern France doesn’t help either. But he is one of the best Flemish painters of his generation. For his latest exhibition, “Le jugement de Pâris à Bruxelles” (The Judgment of Paris in Brussels), he took a cue from Greek mythology. Paris was the Trojan shepherd prince who had to judge which of the Greek goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite deserved the golden apple with the inscription

Gorgeous color photographs, as elegant and beguiling as advertising pictures, showed crisply illuminated vases holding a variety of bouquets before white backdrops. And no less elegant were the steles that were set up in the middle of the gallery. Yet something about this installation by Prague-based artist Adam Vačkář felt disquieting. The series of bouquets bears the title “Beautiful & Damned,” 2014, and they are no doubt beautiful—but why are they damned? Look more closely and you’ll discover that some of the flowers, slipped in among others gleaming in diverse colors, have wilted. And