Brave New World

Marie-Lise Laviolette's Brave New World is twenty-two majors in contemporary minimalism from a French artist, and the record offers little more, another resident of the gallery wing where artist's majors outnumber their documentation. The Huxley-borrowed title carries its own charge: a deck named for literature's great ironic utopia suggests majors read as modernity's stations, the brave new world's own trumps. French minimalist tarot has a particular lineage, the tradition that gave tarot its Marseille rigor periodically returning to strip it down again, and Laviolette's entry belongs to that current of reduction as homecoming. Minimalist majors read fast and open, the reader supplying what the economy withholds. It suits collectors of French contemporary decks, minimalists, literary readers who catch the title's irony, and gallery-wing completists. The fully furnished decks stand ready elsewhere; this one packed light for the new world, as one does.