The Brooklyn Rail

Ethan Kramer’s debut solo exhibition Second Thought Best Thought, now on view at Entrance’s Ludlow Street space, is a dense group of heady, expressive paintings that at times literally burst at the seams with the need to exist. Kramer works in the scrap heap materially and philosophically, hoarding and sorting through everything from thrown-away canvasses and scraps of fabric to gestures, jokes, and signals from the painting of the past, turning the uncertainty and relief of accumulation, destruction, and rebuilding into a game-like language that’s entirely its own.

The imposing Congrats on This (all works 2025) and its pepto-pink antecedent Great Regular Flavor are tank-tire-tracks or suburban aerial views on canvasses that seem to have been stretched ten times over—again, bursting—while smaller works like Happy birthday to my future doctor and Siri’s Vacation bear the scuff-marks and grain lines of processed lumber. Still, this physicality doesn’t get in the way of our imagination: in the postal beige of Undulating Day, a neutron star orbits a black hole (a penciled-around stamp of mustard yellow and a little circle of felt like you’d find leveling a chair in elementary school), accretion disk and all, absorbing and refracting halfway what could be the entire planet, or just the non-Manhattan parts of the subway map, depending on your sense of geography.

Kramer employs several languages at once here, with playful watercolor (Today’s year old), sparse vexillology (Metal Point) and dashes of the sculptural in the delightful Movie Night with 16 Dogs. One gets the feeling with this exhibition that Kramer is as much building a world from information and objects, loved and unloved, as he is trying to formulate methods for liftoff somewhere else. It’s a tricky thing I can appreciate from poetic practice: spend enough time creating and elaborating upon your internal world, and the unwavering mind-fuzz of the post-information age will inevitably creep in. It’s how you deal with it that counts. There’s a tension here between the joy of experiencing art and the systemic alienation of city living, the long charting through concrete monoliths and tawny city streets to get to the show where everyone still looks at you funny. (It’s not lost on me that the “second thought,” itself a sly flip of an Allen Ginsberg quote, is as much about building new things on top of old things as it is the choice to do anything else.) The accompanying essay by mentor and neighboring star Amy Sillman described Kramer as having “a syntax of elements drawn from everywhere,” and this show’s disruptive strength is its ability to mean it, ugly and profound as “everywhere” can be.

Flipping through Kramer’s titles in the gallery’s single spiral-bound checklist is a little bit like scrolling Meta’s X competitor Threads, which is known to randomly signal boost the highly personal Facebook posts of otherwise well-meaning people who don’t even know they have the cross-posting feature on. MEDITATION CLASS is tomorrow, Ozempic Sniper, and Blue One or Red One all read like someone else’s private thoughts beamed into my skull, and they look the part too, as cryptographic pseudo-letters descend in otherworldly fashion upon their competent white-grey-tobacco-beige plains. But with this much information on display, Kramer still manages to walk us outside: in Blue One or Red One, the impermanent colored pencil wisps of red and blue, greatly obscured by a jumble of Christopher Wool-ian black flashe against touches of gray on dormitory white, give off the weight and strange nausea of cop car lights through windows or the endless shock cycle of roundtables on cable news. Disruption has its ups and downs.

As painters (and critics!) born post-2000 emerge into the art world that’s left for us, there’s been question after question about whether the flatness-of-influence we’ve come to represent (deservedly or not) will mean anything for our art. With his debut, Kramer gives us something of an answer, deploying an elusive lexicon of keyholes, through lines, clips, and one-shots—a mash-up of abstractions from the last one hundred years possible only by growing up with the vast expanse of the internet—but when it peaks, as it so often does, it’s also a direct-to-picture translation of the overwhelm and hilarity that is navigating a modern world which is increasingly foreign to everyone older than you and existentially threatening to everyone younger than you. What else is there to do but take whatever’s around and try to paint your way out?