Henry Curchod is reorganizing a surface as he paints. Until I had seen his work in person I didn't quite see the gestures, the movement, the unraveling of something certain into something almost moving across the canvas, like trying to reconstruct a reality. I walked away with the feeling that Curchod is trying to make sense of and reevaluate something that used to be so simply understood, as if he was told to recreate his life on Earth now on a different planet. What does it look like? What does a memory do when it's so far away? He wrote of his new show, Rome is no longer in Rome, "Painting — and even more so, drawing — offers an opportunity to untangle ourselves, or to offer up the ingredients of our own deconstructed salad, reconstituted for inspection." Perhaps it's just right there in the name, a body of work about what once was and will never be again, a chaotic but energized end of days. —Evan Pricco
