Staff Picks: Laughing Cows, Lo-Fi Bangers, and Convulsing Balls of Snakes

The devil truly is in the details when it comes to Thomas Bayrle, whose , “Playtime,” opened in June at the New Museum. His paintings are hypnotic. Large images are made up of tinier and tinier versions of the same image, demonstrating a Pointillism all his own. The first floor of the survey is saturated with color and pattern (even on the walls and floors), an initially delightful effect that quickly becomes creepily unreal. My companion and I sat transfixed, eyes wide and mouths slightly agape, in a theater where the screen played the image of a digitally rendered face, zooming in to reveal that the likeness in fact comprised thousands of screaming mouths, and then zooming back out again. Face after face appeared on the screen, each revealing itself