"Thank You For The Nice Fire" is a show of new paintings by Chloe Wise, on view at Almine Rech Gallery in New York through April 17. The works address our experience in the U.S. amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, where anxieties around health risks confront our needs for comfort. Delicious stills of butter and garlic have wary titles like "Historical little illuminations," and "Interstitial little offenses." Smiling portraits are labeled "Glowing symptoms of success," and "A frenzy of indifference." A quote from Jean Baudrillard, America (1986), helps contextualize the current moment: “This is the only country which gives you the opportunity to be so brutally naive: things, faces, skies, and deserts are expected to be simply what they are. This is the land of the ‘just as it is’.”