The old utopias are of little use anymore—those storied havens of self-sufficient living, unbroken meditation cycles, serenity in absentia. In this new era, streets burn. Our voices crack, our heads and our hearts. Glimpsed through our contemporary disquiet, such outworn freedom narratives show themselves to be little more than escapist indulgence dressed as countercultural dissent. Where is your utopia now? Where is your fantasy?

“My world is all fantasy,” Ryan McGinley once said before closing the circle this way: “Within my world of fantasy I am searching for moments that seem like reality.”

In the mid-twentieth century, Brazil’s multishaded racial democracy may have looked good compared to Jim Crow policies in the United States, but lately, bolstered by the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, the “tropical Trump,” racism in Brazil has violently worsened. In a country where about half the population is nonwhite, three-quarters of the victims of police killings are black.

This was the grim context for the exhibition “Social Signs,” displaying four of Brazilian artist No Martins’s large, brightly colored figurative paintings. His black-skinned subjects include a defiant-looking mother standing