The Brazilian painter Lucia Laguna was once a language teacher. She brings her knowledge of linguistics to the practice of painting, developing the medium’s discursive potential. Her studio, tucked into the hills above Rio de Janeiro, is home to the visual lexicon she deploys in her paintings, her dictionary of images. Laguna has developed a form of conversational collaboration with her studio assistants. Following discussions of subject and color, her collaborators paint the first layer of each small- or large-scale oil or acrylic canvas so that Laguna may formally reply. Davi Baltar and Claudio

The unexpected inspiration for Alain Bublex’s recent homage to American landscape painting is First Blood (1982), the original John Rambo movie, a film cowritten by, and famously starring, Sylvester Stallone. For the French artist—whose interest in Americana previously inspired works such as the Ryder Project, 1999, a caravan of moving trucks that crossed the United States, and “Buy Steel,” 2006–, a series of photographs documenting depressed industrial landscapes in the Ohio Valley—the movie’s provincial setting of Hope, Washington (though the film was actually shot in Canada), recalled the