Control X, a solo exhibition by Tala Madani, features new paintings and animations in which characters and settings subject themselves, willingly or not, to forces by which they are broken down and reformed. The works address mythologies of creation as they trace the fine lines between making and destroying in art, language, history, and human relationships. By foregrounding acts of markmaking, the exhibition establishes emotionally resonant parallels between the worlds the figures inhabit and the materially present world of painting itself. The result is a form of realism that goes beyond artifice, and that allows the work to address the widest possible range of historical, art historical, and contemporary crises with both humor and critique.