Painting Boredom

Henni Alftan, Classroom, 2020, oil on canvas, 28 3/4 by 23 2/3 inches; at Karma.
At a time when events seem to accumulate rather than unfold, when news is always breaking, and boredom alleviated with the tap of a finger, it is hard not to appreciate the slow and absorbing canvases of Henni Alftan. In the nineteen paintings on view in Alftan’s first US solo show, held in both of Karma’s Lower East Side spaces, the Finnish-born painter, based in Paris since the late 1990s, lavishes att