THE SURREAL WORLDS

Read together, the paintings share a vocabulary. A few motifs return again and again, and once you notice them the work opens up: monkeys dressed as people (the old singerie, the ape that mocks human vanity), long-beaked carnival and plague-doctor masks, caged birds, the still-life language of transience (clocks, bubbles, butterflies, shells), riders on the wrong animal, and walls of carved idols that watch the scene like a frozen crowd. What follows looks at each painting through that lens, longer where there is more to find, shorter where the pleasure is mostly in the looking, and each one tries to land somewhere rather than simply describe.