More than a dozen unstretched canvases by Jean Degottex, each hardly bigger than a typed page, were displayed in a vitrine in “À la ligne,” a deftly curated and flawlessly installed exhibition devoted primarily to eighteen wall-hung paintings on paper or cloth. Several clearly paired sets demonstrated, with didactic clarity, one of his signature techniques, that of the report: the pressing of one surface or part of a surface against another so as to effect the mediated transfer of painterly marks. (The temporally charged infinitive, reporter, might be translated in this context as “carrying

In conversation with a bee orchid, how best to obtain its sweat? (a) Tell it you are thirsty? (b) Ask it to make you wet? (c) Tell it you want to be sucked by a mushroom? The answer, in the world of Mimosa Echard’s role-playing game Sporal, is that any of the above approaches will get you the goods. Distributed across an exhibition at Palais de Tokyo, a book, and a downloadable video game, Sporal (all works cited, 2022) featured, as its protagonist monocellular organism, a being who seeks to mutate into other life-forms using fluids it takes from other species. The character is based on Echard’s