In March, as reality changed abruptly and irrevocably, I was preparing to write a catalogue essay on the artist William Buchina, an uncanny confluence of events. Buchina’s images are emblems of irrationality, jumbles of stream-of-consciousness thought-pictures suffused with the cryptic symbols of secret societies and conspiracy cults, whose emotionally blank humans are frequently concealed behind masks or bizarre breathing apparatuses. I felt as if I were watching the world turn into his paintings.
Subsequent events have only fed this narrative. The hope now is not for any of this to end well, but simply for it to end. [
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