Tala Madani at 303 Gallery

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The projection screen of painting is the same projection screen as the minds eye. You draw from one to draw onto another. Mirror images. And Madani's projection screens make this act explicit, the theater of the imagination. Like Wade Guyton who rode a wave of funereal optimism that we would one day merely press print on our dreams. That painting expressing its ability to conjure is desirable because it proves wishes can be made concrete. You can dream it, you can print it. Or paint it, like all those paintings of Jesus. But Madani shares a similar nihilism as Guyton: that what we will see in other's printed conscious is a lot of nightmares, Madani's.


See too: Wade Guyton at Academie Conti & Le Consortium, Tala Madani at David Kordansky

Klara Liden at Reena Spaulings

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Dance in the expanded sense. The ability for a body to move, across a theater stage or clipping fences to access a city's forbidden sites. Liden's early video dance beating a bike to death, or hysteric strip on train car. The literal moonwalk and ballet practice. Videos. Dance. The posters are just tchotchkes advertising this theater performance, bodily movement that Liden's practice always been invested in.
So then here, the pratfall, physical comedy, SLAPSTICK. The world turned to rubber. "In social psychology, the pratfall effect is the tendency for attractiveness to increase or decrease after an individual makes a mistake. An individual perceived to be highly-competent would be considered, on average, more likable after committing a blunder, while the opposite would occur if a person perceived as average made a mistake." There's something about our world today where slapstick isn't as funny.

Past: Tala Mandani

"Conjuring in the virtual theater of imagination's Matrix-like plane, Madani's paintings foreground the drawing of imagination from an abyss, that, like Bacon's claustro-realms, become spaces for enacting and enacted belittlements and torture, and what this means for Madani in psychoanalytic terms is hard to tell.  Mandani has been painting these men for a long time, and when a grey man in the soft shape of middle age sporting an open robed Santa outfit urinates on babies in a wallpapered room, there isn't a shock, the babies already wear the beards of their adulthood..."


Click here to read: Tala Madani at David Kordansky

Past: Klara Liden at Reena Spaulings

"At best Liden's "examinations of the anxiety of urban space" demonstrates the fraughtness on which society often rests: flippantly publishing the keys to city, (e.g. bolt cutters and flashlight); implicit threat of artist's desublimating their professions higher order bashing a bicycle to death (see too: real violence); or the small smile of this exhibition's theft of things that delineate private property (i.e. stealing the things that make private property possible). Bristling the small hairs separating us from chaos. The giddy nerves of being in break down's presence. Feel the rush of anarchism from the safety of the institution..."


Klara Liden at Reena Spaulings, Klara Liden and Karl Holmqvist at Kunstverein Braunschweig, Klara Lidén, Alicia Frankovich at Kurator

Past:Karl Holmqvist at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis

"We like words, we trust words, our whole society practically predicted on words, everywhere, ubiquitous, magnificent and fragile. So the Holmqvistic hammering of words into tin for his cymbal tapping repetition could feel either charmingly disruptive or cruel.  Holmqvist has expressed less affinity for jazz than for noise, words become the sensation of objects felt with a numb hand, the cacophony of nerves deprived...."

Read full: Karl Holmqvist at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis

Tania Pérez Córdova at Kunsthalle Basel

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Cosmetics, gunpowder, and volcanic ash walk into a gallery and smear themselves onto the wall. Conceptual art is a lot of jokes without punchlines. Instead a lapse, opening expanse like vacancy. This room is the interpretable space, the gap, where we could manifest the punchline. "The mathematician confronted with fire, proves that solution exists, and goes back to bed." The cymbals and relief of punchlines is replaced by the viewer as critic who interprets. This gap between the returns are literal here, physicalized in the holes of pots attempted to be recast into original forms. That's funny. But not like haha funny. The holes mimicking the ones placed in your head, you fill them.

Kandis Williams at Cooper Cole

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"especially in the art world where we have so many unlanguaged connections to the images of empire. [Those images are] the forms and fragments of Platonic ideals that now serve as our perceptual tools."

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