Dike Blair’s art is thoroughly cosmopolitan—deeply informed, intensely considered, and visually impeccable. Working at small scale, Blair attends closely to relations among his paintings, sequencing them in what he sees as snippets of conversation rather than extended narratives. We met on a cold January day in a backroom at Karma’s new Chelsea gallery, where the paintings for his current exhibition were temporarily hung, aptly enough, on sliding screens.

In 2011, The Clock seemed plausibly comprehensive, or at least representative, in its sampling of popular filmmaking. It reached back to the medium’s birth and forward to the present. Now, it feels like a decidedly closed circle, its daylong loop shaped like a clock face, or an old-fashioned can of celluloid. It seems an artifact of a period when the media circus was just a little quieter, jump cuts slower, and the boundary between fact and fiction more secure. Of course, my temporal position has shifted too.