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.

The solo exhibition Amazonia, opening on May 22, brings together a body of work produced by Julia out of her sustained engagement with the Shipibo Indigenous community of the Peruvian Amazon. The show is structured around four groups of pieces and combines watercolor and ink on paper, embroidered textile work, installation, and cyanotype...

Before art, there was the image. The wind has been drawing linear patterns on the dunes for millions of years, always different and yet always recognisable. Water has polished stones into lovely pebbles, full of nuance. Polyps shape the corals themselves, raising branched, almost labyrinthine structures of extraordinary beauty out of blind secretions of calcium carbonate. Arabesques that art can imitate but never surpass...

Mónica has summited something enormous today. And I am probably just as happy as she is, as happy as the people who love her most. Whether she shares it is her call. I want to share this joy by retrieving some words I once wrote about her work, when she was just beginning at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Americas.