This past June, Danny Bredar appeared in Italy. Masaccio and Piero della Francesca had always emitted a distant light for the artist, but he’d hardly conceived of what it might be like to see their work up close, to see his vision reflected back at him. Now he was there—Florence, Monterchi, Arezzo, the cradle of Western painting culture. What quest or grail could be found within the classical overload? Inevitably, he’d depart the glinting frescos without answers, eat some spaghetti alle vongole, and keep driving.

Taking it easy but having some serious business to attend to: this is Bredar’s notion of the Anarchist’s Vacation, in which the artist/hero/clown hovers above his own consciousness in a mixture of detachment and self-critical imagination. Channeling the omniscient third-person perspective of video games or novels, he projects his perception beyond his present-tense bodily experience—he’s right here and over there, inside and outside, stationary and on the move. These maneuvers…