Matti Braun at BQ

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What you thought were some lovely glass is instead a cruel deployment of cultural signifiers. Report to the text for your education. The big reveal, the pleasance is actually "meaning."  

 

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork at Empty Gallery

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Art is the airline hanger where we assess the fallen debris of culture - let the objects, set to dance by artists, "speak." We initiates perform the ancient practice of meaning. Divine from cultural tea leaves a wall text, a press release, a content. The use-value of art, meaning, the world is not arbitrary, there are things in the dark trees, we cannot see them but assume them, look until your eyes produce them.

See too: Airline Wreckage

Matthieu Palud at Les Bains-Douches

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Paintings intentionally underwhelmed. Just whelmed. Which you can be in Europe. It's hard to be this artless. Which Palud - stylistically a Cheshire cat - has been playing at a while. Against the neon stylings of today - dull light is relief. Apple and water for your hangover. Even the doorways of Hammershøi and churchlight of Zurbaran are too much. 

Adam Alessi at Hoffman Donahue

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There's a threshold where horror and style cross into something.. else. Tim Burton perhaps, where an arabesque cutesery becomes its own grotesque. A clam corpse flaired like a theater-kid. A fedora perhaps. Resident Evil's victorian mommy. Hard to pinpoint what is so off putting about Tim Burton, but so blockbuster to some. If painters are going to treat the body as some compositional putty to dislocate hips for painterly whims.. at least admitting the horror to the manipulation seems earnest - if manneristly unnecessary. 

Dan Walsh at Galerie Thomas Schulte

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We already have flowers in the world, so it's important for artists to invent new ones. The pleasure of Walsh's is seeing the system that grew them. We like organized arrangements. A lawful hand to sort god's variance. Pleasure in the programming of color, light, form, our own little garden not nature's.

Bettina at Ulrik

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Most artists today produce "series" - their commodification of a single artistic thought. For many art itself has become a form for inventing processes to serialize, commodify, i.e. "the production method is the product." Developing a "viewpoint", "signature" or "conceptual framework" - pick your ballyhoo'd sales tactic. A historic development likely due to the demands of both filling an exhibition schedule, and the fact that "the exhibition" had superseded the object as art's measurable unit of thought. Perhaps one stemming from the other. Bettina was an artist who, without any exhibition schedule or inventory space at all, mass invented means for artistic mass production, and then followed through on that production beyond the point of rational good thought - eventually filling her apartment so full she slept in the hallway on a lawn chair (or so the myth goes.) It's like an artistic Sorcerer's Apprentice, one conceptual Library of Babel spell is invented and the things begin to spawn, producing and reproducing until you live outside in a different world, unable to invent the spell to shut the brooms off. 

Josh Smith at David Zwirner

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What is left to be said about the mid career. In the early days of his career Smith was oft referenced as a machine, descriptors like "profligate," "hyper" "overproduction" of "meaninglessness." This is what made him interesting or critical or novel, what ascribed value, or, at least, what people talked about. It was the Guyton Walker Price Smith era - the production was point. 

What was with our fetish then for exaggerated manufacture remains a question, for in the era since we've grown tired of "zombies" that Smith and the gang had some hand spawning. Guyton, Walker, Price, a group for whom production was theme: recycling, automation, dispersion and Smith's prolificacy spamming himself into consciousness, beating his name and himself in the head. That Smith is now making painting that are fine, pleasant even, a sort of radical gesture of normalcy...

Now they are just Zwirner paintings. Just paintings. Smith's paintings were always impressionist flowers, dumb stupid arbitrary. But now death rides a bicycle. As a "Live fast, die young" analogy for Smith's slapdash, it is the first time the content seems anything but non-sequitur.  But really it is a leisurely journey toward death. 

See too: Wow.. this press release is practically bulging with self-pleasure: "First" "Infinite" "instantly" "absolutely everything" "A whole new world" "immediate" "now" "the spirit" These are the words you can buy with blue chips. The artist is pure experience, sensation. Plugged into the raw. So, it doesn't matter they look like bad post-impressionism, the point is that the artist is electric