Art: Revelations in a Dank Garden

In New York, a mystery cast by Jennifer Bartlett

Twentieth century art has always liked the random. Chance meetings of images, the weird threat an unfocused eye hooks from the normal texture of life: these have fueled the reverie and invention of innumerable artists. From De Chirico's piazzas to Steven Spielberg's suburbs, our culture is intermittently fascinated by the noonday goblin—the sense that something is askew within the well lit, the ordinary, and that the closer you peer the odder it gets. Jennifer Bartlett, whose recent paintings are currently on view at the Paula...