Venice’s canals impose an odd sort of leveling on one’s sense of history here: time moves only upwards (new spires, new façades, higher doorways to beat the acqua alta), never down.

A video in Óscar Muñoz’s “Biografías” series (2002) shows a floating, ethereal portrait rendered in powdery black charcoal. As we watch, the cheek elongates and skews into the eye; we hear the familiar slurp of water sucked down a drain, and abruptly the likeness is gone, slumped into a black heap against the curve of the sink.

In his 1977 memoir, dealer Julien Levy enshrined what was to be an enduring myth of painter Arshile Gorky’s career: Gorky the imitator, the apprentice who copied styles and whole works of the modern masters before breaking through, c.1943, to his own “Gorky-ness.”

Paperpatterncolorculture, the fall exhibition at Philadelphia’s Pentimenti Gallery, explores the layering of written and marked material. In the works collected here, calligraphy, heraldic symbols, and patterned icons wend their way through a variety of stacked and folded substrata: translucent papers, collaged vinyl records, tightly-wound paper scrolls.

Kirby Holland, the fictional protagonist of R. C. Baker’s ongoing novel-cum-exhibition, explains his art-making process this way: “I put…these collages…together as grounds, the surface you paint on,” before laying the abstract designs on top: “I need some grit, something to hang my compositions on.”

Nicolas Carone, veteran artist of 1940s New York and still painting some sixty years on, presents new work at Washburn Gallery this month: eight fast, vigorous, and poised arrangements in gray and white and black acrylics.

The body’s evocative layers of skin, desire, and pain have long been a rich departure point for art-making. We take many of the body’s conditions as givens: its materiality, its mortality, its role as both substratum and surface to the human soul.

In the center of Uri Aran’s Geraniums, a wooden dresser tilts forward at an angle, drawers out and cabinet doors aslant. Emerging from the trunk’s center, like an impossibly long keyboard tray, is a fake, flat-screen “aquarium,” a motorized roll of plastic scrolling brightly printed fish along an ultramarine background.

Suitcase Paintings: Small Scale Abstract Expressionism, a traveling exhibition making its final stop at Chicago’s Loyola University Museum of Art this fall, argues a case for small works: what dealer Larry Aldrich purportedly deemed “suitcase paintings,” or those he could fit in his suitcase.

In 1894, August Strindberg, the late-nineteenth-century playwright, produced a series of enigmatic images he deemed ‘celestographs.’ He made them by leaving photographic plates out at night and then developing the results, which consisted of splotches and nebulous dot clusters on a black ground.