I had a lot of curiosity coming into this exhibition. It had been three years since Gaga had shown a local artist; Karla Kaplun is young, and “La Compañia” (The Company) was her first solo show in an established gallery. Intriguing, too, was the traditional sensibility of her pieces: figurative oil paintings, a couple of them large-format and encased in ornate wooden frames.

Kaplun puts a fresh twist on eighteenth-century academicism and seventeenth-century Baroque. Her subjects are sometimes biblical—they include a Madonna in one painting, a figure with stigmata in a pose that recalls the