“Sky”, “roof”, “31”, a mantra turns into paint. There is a poverty to the language confronting a practice like Bartlett’s – either methodical and repetitious, or verging on the clinically obsessive – that dwells in the personal. Bartlett spent decades assembling triangles and squares on the canvas, painting her childlike structures by numbers, before, in turn, arranging those in a sequence. The exaggerated relevance of “house” to someone who (aside from living in one, duh) was a painter becomes a method of madness, stripping the artist of calculation and sheer bloody-mindedness. Would another dictionary – think in Hanne Darboven’s Plattendeutsch, for example – have turned this house into Babel?