There are many good reasons to cry. Many bad, also. Love, laughter, fear, fury, disgust, relief, vacuity, loss. (“Loss is legion,” Gillian Rose writes.) Scant few human reactions denote such an abundance of emotion as the single tear shed.

But, given its ability to symbolize so universally, the tear in isolation frustrates. Cropped to close quarters, liquid on a stranger’s face, the lone tear lacks the contextualizing information required to determine its causality. “Tears are signs,” croons Roland Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse (1977), “not expressions.” Displaced from their flesh and blood,

It makes sense that Ryan Mosley shares a gallery with Neo Rauch, since both the British painter and his older German colleague use deliberate narrative lacunae and patched-together compositions to suggest the collapse of former certainties. In Rauch’s case, the world he limned was, at least initially, the post-Communist one. Mosley, over the dozen-odd years since he left London’s Royal College of Art, has fashioned colorful, instinctive-feeling, uneasy carnivalesques full of Picassian harlequin patterning, James Ensor–ish skulls, cacti, animals, and, often, men in stovepipe or bowler hats and