Continuing through February 28, 2026
Eugène Ionesco’s play “The Bald Soprano” (1950), with its chattering English couples the Smiths and the Martins conversing in non-sequiturs, is a classic of absurdist drama. It was inspired by the playwright’s efforts to learn English with a bilingual French/English language book, “English Without Pain” (incidentally, Ionesco’s original title), which is full of instructive but banal sentences that, transposed into dramatic dialogue, sound insane, like parrots’ monologues. The play ends with the repetition of its opening lines spoken by the Smiths, now repeated, in the Smiths’ home, by the Martins. It’s a closed system of nonsense.
The arbitrary nature of language and culture — or convention — has been the target of jokes in art before. Magritte’s primer paintings, which label generically rendered images such as one might find in a child’s dictionary with the wrong name, stand out: the image of a horse, for example, is labeled, instructively, la valise. Even rough-edged blotches of paint take on names in these Teach-Yourself-Wittgensteinese language-and-being paradoxes.
Finnish sculptor Henna Vainio might claim aesthetic kinship with Ionesco as a fellow student of the complexities and contradictions of hybrid, polyglot English. “Opposite Knots” is a group of eleven tinted and glazed ceramic sculptures (all 2025) in which she spells out specific words that have caught her attention, transforming them into linear tangles, like unfurled typewriter ribbons. The pieces fall into two groups. The first is made up of six airy “Opposite Knots” wall pieces, three large and three small, composed of a few layers of words aligned in different orientations. Then there are four densely packed pedestal sculptures that are suggestive of industrial or architectural constructions in geometric forms.
Vainio’s “Opposite Knots” are flattened arrays of superimposed words that are barely legible, though they make for wonderful linear abstractions in the mold of Brice Marden. “Opposite Knots (Stop)” repeats its peremptory command, which we associate with LED traffic signage, in looping letters, with the clay possibly extruded and slip-joined. They look like willow branches or other woodcrafts, the archaic visual aspect contradicting the urgency of its automated message.
“No Net (peach)” and “No Net (blue)” simulate open-form weavings. They are composed, respectively, in vertical and horizontal formats, replete with the catenary droop of hanging yarn or rope, and repeating the single word ‘no.’ No exit, no escape, everything not mandatory is forbidden. The three smaller “Opposite Knots” works, each sixteen inches square, pair linguistic opposites that are held together as if by magnetic polarities. The ‘you’ ln “Opposite Knots (You)” links with ‘me; ‘give’ with ‘take; ‘yes with ‘no.’; and ‘more’ with ‘less.’
Four pedestal-sized sculptures, all under two feet square, are dense. compact, hedge-like arrays of words in the geometric forms of square or cube, rectangular prism (extended cube) and octahedron (pyramid). All are skeletonized down to their wintry semiotic bare branches. ”Doubt Janus” is a vertical layer of letters, like a billboard scaffolding, the opposite faces of which spell out ‘yes,’ referring to the two-faced Roman god Janus looking forward and backward. Perhaps, for the artist and modern neurotics, Janus may be thought of as the God of Second Thoughts and Over-Thinking.
The interlocked letters of the cubic (but off-kilter) “Win” suggest strength in unity, but also, carried to an extreme, paralysis and stasis. The impenetrable verbal thicket of “Tender Change” suggests that money is both a magical protean substance capable of assuming any form, and a potential trap. “Anti-Age,” with its pyramidal form suggestive of both campfires and the crushing monuments of the ancient Egyptian Pharaohs, is about how the anti-aging properties of modern cosmetics and surgery can only exert limited power against the inevitable flow of time and life’s oxidations. Such are the moralizing lessons of these witty contemporary artifacts.
