In Book XXXV of his Natural History —Naturalis Historiae libri XXXVII— Pliny the Elder, while addressing the origins of modelling in clay, recounts the story of Butades, a potter from Corinth. Western scholarship places this account around the sixth century BCE. Butades had a daughter who loved, with uncommon intensity, a young man suddenly compelled to leave on a journey...

Two of the works from Leticia Sánchez Toledo’s recently closed exhibition at Annex Gallery will remain in Cincinnati. Offering an additional reading is hardly gratuitous, especially one that places them, for the local audience, within a more precise context. Works produced by emigrants seldom rest on purely aesthetic assumptions.

Although I am an avowed admirer of her solo work and have known her for nearly twenty-five years, I do not remember ever having spoken in person with Liudmila Velasco. About her work, about the weather, about how unbearable this or that artist can become. When I left the island, Liudmila was already practically an institution within Cuban women’s photography...

When we first came across Tim Harrier’s Shaman Spirit Guides, we dismissed them without mercy as the product of artificial intelligence. The mud-covered faces, the animals emerging from the background, and an unbroken frontal force produced, almost at once, a malignant suspicion. Suspicion ran far ahead of the work. And we are right to suspect almost everything in life. This series, no...

There is a book. Before the exhibition, before the charcoal drawings spread across the galleries of the Contemporary Arts Center, before the viewer crosses the blue thresholds into the dreamworld of Freeman Little...

Now and again, chance weaves a concurrence of circumstances that places us before a window opening onto the past. The opportunity to converse, undistracted, with the Austrian artist Stylianos Schicho was a privilege, since what most interests me in art are the sinews that bind it to whoever produces it.

As a worthy walk-on, more than once I have stood inside a still life: the living scene of a dead nature staged with everyday objects. Between Morandi and Chirico — take your pick of Giorgios — lit by the fierce Miami sun or beneath the drizzle of a summer afternoon, I have slipped into the heart of the anomaly, into the "temple of otherness."

A month ago, during Arte Desobediente Exhibition, I encountered for the first time an artwork by Kerstin Imhoff that has remained with me ever since. It was a visceral piece from her ongoing Bloodline series: a hyperrealistic red vulva rendered in wax-like texture through 3D printing, encircled by a Catholic rosary terminating in a bronze cross. The work was at once devotional and confrontational; an image suspended between martyrdom, sexuality, political violence, and feminine embodiment...

We accept this kind of photograph before we understand it. That is why we are here. They are striking, drawing on the same formal vocabulary inherited from Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, the great schools of studio portraiture on a flat ground. Ever since, we have surrendered to the magic of high contrast, to the shameful retreat of the second plane, of the surroundings, of the context. As though none of that added anything to the emotion or to a denser reading.