Chicago-based artist Alice Tippit takes on the interrelations between language and image in her solo show of movingly enigmatic paintings at Patron — specifically, how both can fail us in ways that nevertheless feel meaningful. These works hover between abstraction and visual puns: “Sound” (2022) depicts the silhouette of a hammer twice-bent, rendering it both useless and helpless. That’s not to say that Tippit communicates on a solely cerebral register, though. Her use of color is simultaneously subtle and surprising, and she’s got an eye for simple yet compelling composition. —LYZ